finished the new carmen sandiego game (at least, as far as it'll let me go) so rambly spoilery thoughts below the cut
i admittedly went in with pretty low expectations, but this game surprised me by surpassing them.
i actually highly appreciate the return to the old nostalgic world-hopping formula being mixed with more modern mobile-style minigames. said minigames are repetitive and by no means enthralling, but they're a decent way to break up the potential monotony of figuring out which country to go to next.
that said, ya'll really needed more countries on your list. this game would have felt far more expansive and globe-trotty if you'd had, like, at least twice as many cities on the roster.
also the circuit minigame specifically can go die in a fire
you're rewarded pretty well with references and in-jokes if you're a legacy fan who's been obsessed with carmen sandiego since you were a tiny tot in the 90s. the joke about the atom smasher from math detective had me in tears.
jacqueline hyde was extremely obvious to anyone who had ever played an old carmen game, and her just being sus in general was probably still obvious even to those who weren't aware of her existence from previous games. still, it was kinda satisfying just to see the twist play out.
not the hugest fan of the graphics style admittedly (2d-style point-and-click art my beloved i miss you) but i can live with it, and at least ur player character does look like a decent 3d approximation of the netflix show's carmen.
there's a couple ui-based plot holes/things that got overlooked (there's a section where player in the story can't communicate with carmen anymore but in the ui and gameplay he's still giving instructions to her), but this is minor and i personally was able to look past it.
the edutainment stuff was pretty good! i do really wish there had been a lot, and i mean A LOT more fun facts about a lot more countries, but what was there was very nicely implemented.
story was a bit of a mess and tbh i couldn't quite tell whether this was something that was supposed to have happened during cs2019 or after it ended. if it's taking place during the show, where are jules and devineaux? if it's taking place after the show, where are zack and ivy, and also why is chief a little too eager to jump to conclusions about us being evil? or maybe this is just another alternative universe, i could believe that. they did mention ann tickwittee and renee santz, too, so they're clearly folding even more older characters into the canon.
the final case is not actually out yet. sighs and cries.
overall score: 8/10. it was nothing revolutionary or mindblowing, but it was fun and educational and i could tell that the people who made it had some real love for the history of carmen sandiego. that was all i really needed from it, in the end. that said, i personally enjoyed it, but if you're not already a huge fan of the old cs games, i can't promise how well this will hit for you.
i know carmen in the netflix ver was brainwashed and that’s like, bad and fucked up and stuff, but also. seeing her act like that was so reminiscent of the old carmen incarnations that evil!carmen became my favorite part of the entire show almost purely because of nostalgia. i mean:
“i do it for the mental gymnastics” being a clear reference to the same line in the retribution trilogy
“i think it’s playing my song” she says, while they blatantly play the old woeics theme
carmen stealing the strad on a whim, just because she can
carmen honestly acting just straight-up UNHINGED in that scene with zack on the ferris wheel, unapologetically villainous like how she was in the computer games
like, netflix carmen is just a VERY different character from all her previous incarnations, but when she turned evil? that was the only time in the entire show that i actually saw her acting like the carmen i knew, the carmen i loved. and i was more here for it than anything else this show had given me.
woeics pilot: oh, kid detectives chasing a charismatic lady thief all around the world! cool! fun! educational!
woeics finale: throughout this entire series we've gotten hints that carmen is actually deeply troubled and that makes her high-stakes thievery games come across as just a ridiculously expensive and overly complicated method of acting out. being orphaned as a child seems to have had a major effect on making her feel unbalanced and incomplete in her own life, and though she has a bright and brilliant intellect, she's emotionally very immature. with that in mind, all her thievery can easily be read as just one gigantic tantrum, a tortured cry for attention. she's been so desperate for love and connection her entire life that the moment she comes across even the SLIGHTEST hint that she might have a family out there, she immediately gives up everything she's ever worked for and willingly LETS her detectives capture her, all so that she can get daddy's attention. she's ready and willing to hang out in jail for who knows how long just for the CHANCE of gaining the approval of someone who she's not even SURE actually is her father, but in the end, whatever tiny possibility there may have been of her connecting with her biological family is snuffed out because her may-or-may-not-be father is immediately put in danger due to his potential relationship with her. carmen ultimately decides that even IF she has finally found her family, it'd be better off if she had nothing to do with him ever again, and this is so utterly fucking tragic honestly like what the fuck. WHAT THE FUCK.
datemate finished woeics and now we’re out here yelling ideas at each other for our own carmen sandiego reboot because we’re both mad that the netflix version isn’t better than it is. i’m so in love.
none of this is fleshed out or anything and some of it might even change in the future, but just some general spitballing:
carmen maintains most of the backstory from woeics. orphaned as a child, was always a prodigy, became the best detective at ACME as a teenager but later left to become a thief, you know the drill.
zack and ivy work with ACME, and the fact that they’re kids is actually made note of. their young age makes them unusual agents for an international detective agency, but it’s not unprecedented, because carmen was a child prodigy at ACME, too. in fact, the siblings’ main reason for working at ACME at their young age is because their parents work there too, and they’re so dedicated to their work that they’re actually kind of neglectful. zack and ivy worked super hard to get into ACME as soon as possible as a way to actually get their parents’ attention for once.
carmen looks at zack and ivy, these kids who are trying so hard to capture her because they think that doing so will get them validation and attention, and she feels a sort of strange kinship with them.
because let’s be honest here, all that thrill-seeking, all that grand high-stakes thievery in the public eye...even if carmen doesn’t necessarily realize it herself, it’s a cry for attention, attention like the kind every child should receive but she never did because she didn’t have parents. even when she was the best detective at ACME, the focus and attention was on her skills as a detective rather than on her, herself, and so a lot of her emotional needs just went unmet. carmen has never quite felt at peace or fulfilled with her life and that’s why she left ACME---and even as a thief, she doesn’t necessarily feel fulfilled, but it’s just the best outlet she’s ever found so she keeps doing it.
anyway, that’s just one of the reasons carmen unintentionally ends up being real fond of the kids even as she taunts them and plays mind games with them, and as the kids interact with her more, they gradually start to become fond of her too. at some point, it becomes a character development thing where they have to actually confront the fact that they like their supposed enemy more than they should, and they have to realize that they might not actually want to capture her anymore so much as help her somehow.
suhara was carmen’s mentor, and he’s a senior agent who kinda just mentors everyone, really. carmen was his favorite, and he could tell that she was troubled, but he didn’t understand the extent of it. plus, stretched thin as he was, he didn’t necessarily have the time or resources to properly help her in any way beyond directing her to focus on her detective work. nowadays he regrets that immensely, but at the time he just didn’t know.
jules argent was once carmen’s partner and friend, and was possibly the only person at ACME who really genuinely saw how carmen was mentally and emotionally struggling during her agent days. jules could kind of see that ACME wasn’t really doing carmen any favors, and she was as supportive and understanding as she could be, but carmen wound up spiraling anyway. when carmen left, it didn’t take jules by surprise, and she would actually have been very supportive of carmen taking a different path in life if that path hadn’t been grand larceny. even now though, she’s still very sympathetic towards carmen, and the anger and betrayal she does feel stems not so much from the fact that carmen left, but from the fact that jules can tell that even now, even as a thief, carmen still isn’t really happy.
jules’s partner ever since carmen left is shadow hawkins, and their vibe is pretty much how it was in tok, but like. shadow’s been on the job for some years now so he’s not “the rookie” anymore, and by now they actually have a pretty decently established amount of trust in each other as partners. they aren’t the ones chasing after carmen here, that’s more or less on zack and ivy, but jules does tend to keep a close eye on the carmen case, and she and shadow are first in line whenever the kids need backup in the field.
also, jules is keeping a close watch on zack and ivy for their own sakes because she’s all too aware of what happened the last time ACME recruited a prodigy and how bad that actually was for them. honestly, jules has at several points seriously considered going up to the chief and just yelling “IF YOU’RE GONNA RECRUIT LITERAL CHILDREN THEN ACTUALLY TAKE CARE OF THEM!!!!”. basically, she and shadow kinda take on mentor-like roles for zack and ivy and it’s cute.
chase devineaux is like, really high up there in the ranks at ACME, but he’s not exactly the type who hangs around the water cooler. he’s involved in the more covert and secret ACME operations, he’s done a lot of undercover work, and he’s definitely had to get his hands dirty before. he doesn’t necessarily show his face around the other characters very much, but every now and then he might pop in to reference his own mission of something mysterious or shady happening in the background. and yes, he still has phoenix, because fuck you netflix let my man have his falcon (and also let him be competent kthnxbai).
chase and carmen were actually partners for a very brief period very early in both of their careers, but as carmen quickly came to be known as ACME’s famous golden girl and chase found that he took well to undercover work that required him to stay out of the limelight, they naturally went their separate ways. they got along fine when they did work together, but they were never all that close, so chase doesn’t have any particular feelings about the fact that carmen left.
speaking of the whole shady stuff happening in the background thing: basically, carmen is mostly stealing for herself, and she’s aware that she’s not somehow morally better than other thieves just because she steals for her own satisfaction rather than for profit. but she can get heated about white-collar crime. it’s very common for carmen, during her games against zack and ivy, to commit thefts that inconvenience rich and powerful people (cough often white men cough), and the kid detectives might perhaps even unveil said rich and powerful people’s misdeeds and corruption in the process of solving the case. also, when it comes to stealing historical artifacts, carmen may have a few things to say about colonization and appropriation and so will pull a stunt like, oh, stealing the entire british museum and then purposefully delivering every single artifact to the land or peoples it originally came from.
on another note, whenever carmen happens to run across the types of criminals who hurt and traffic and kill (not as common, but it happens), she does her best to keep zack and ivy out of it. if for whatever reason this can’t be taken care of by tipping off the typical authorities (local police, FBI, Interpol, etc), she’ll even hack directly into ACME to drop a hot tip---usually to jules, but sometimes to chase if the situation calls for it. even if carmen doesn’t really have trust in ACME as an agency, she has enough professional trust in both jules and chase to know that they’ll do what needs to be done, and jules and chase accept her information because even as it’s established that carmen is ACME’s most wanted, she is certainly not ACME’s most dangerous.
by the way, ACME is. well, it’s a law-enforcement agency that operates all over the world. it’s so big that not everyone or everything that happens in it is necessarily always good. zack and ivy will have to face that at some point in their work, and that’s when they really first run into chase, since that stuff is sort of under his jurisdiction, too.
also, the good guides are here. they’re not necessarily main characters, but they show up from time to time to help zack and ivy out with information and busting clues now and then. ann’s their go-to for deciphering ancient artifacts, renee can help with identifying information about art and music, ivan’s the techno whiz, etc etc.
character development happens and carmen actually gets to heal herself. this is something that never really happened in woeics, and while i don’t necessarily blame woeics for that, it’s something i’ve always kinda wanted for her and my datemate got so fucking heated over how tragically the series finale decides to end carmen’s story so yeah. we’re doing this.
datemate finished woeics and now we’re out here yelling ideas at each other for our own carmen sandiego reboot because we’re both mad that the netflix version isn’t better than it is. i’m so in love.
While working on this larger Carmen Sandiego history project, I’ve had the hardest time keeping the canon straight. I created multiple spreadsheets just to figure it all out. And once I did, I wanted to make a cheat sheet for quick reference.
The cheat sheet became an infographic.
If you’d like to support my ongoing research, feel free to donate to my Patreon!
(If you want to view this as a single graphic, you can find that here.)
Carmen Sandiego’s first showed up 35 years ago today in WHERE IN THE WORLD IS CARMEN SANDIEGO? for the Apple II.
But she wasn’t yet wearing her iconic red outfit (she wore a black hat and fur coat), and she didn’t yet have her memorable circular logo.
Carmen’s crest went through more iterations than you probably realized. As part of my ongoing research on the history of the series, I’ve tried to assemble a definitive history of how the logo evolved, with as much historical information as I’ve been able to gather.
(Looking for a single-image non-slideshow version? Here you go.)
“You two did a lot together,” Hawkins says outside the coliseum in Rome, and that draws Jules out of her reminiscing, draws her away from the memory of Carmen’s victorious smirk when they finally slapped the cuffs on the boss of that smuggling operation. “What happened? I mean, why did she leave ACME?”
“...Maybe I’ll tell you sometime,” Jules manages to reply around the rising lump in her throat. “For now, let’s concentrate on tracking her down.”
It’s easier to dodge the question than to admit she has no idea.
~
Carmen was always a loose cannon, even back when she worked for ACME.
Once, on a stakeout in the dead of night, she and Jules trailed a suspect to a warehouse where the heads of a trafficking ring were temporarily hiding out. Carmen peeked inside to survey the situation while Jules called the Chief to send backup, but any teams were at least two hours away and the culprits were already in the process of clearing out.
“There’s no time,” Carmen concluded. “We have to catch these guys ourselves, now.”
“We can’t!” Jules hissed in protest. “There’s got to be at least ten of them in there!”
“Fourteen,” Carmen said. “But we have these.” She pulled out two pairs of night-vision goggles from her bag and shoved one into Jules’s hands. Then she dashed for the circuit breaker before Jules could stop her.
Once the lights went out, it was too late to turn back, so Jules went along with her partner’s crazy plan as her heart hammered in her throat the whole way. In the end, with the cover of darkness as their aid, they successfully neutralized all the suspects, but Carmen got a bullet graze wound to her shoulder because one trigger-happy goon got lucky.
After everything was over, Jules punched her in that shoulder. Carmen laughed through the pain.
That’s just who Carmen was. She knew she could do anything, she was an unstoppable force, and nobody could ever hope to rein her in. Not even Jules. So whatever reasons Carmen had for leaving ACME, she made that choice on her own, and everyone who blamed Jules for her partner’s betrayal honestly gave her too much credit.
Nothing Jules did could have made Carmen leave.
(Nothing Jules did could have made Carmen stay.)
~
Hawkins thinks he can do anything. He almost reminds Jules of Carmen in that sense, except Carmen didn’t think she could do anything, she knew it. And Jules knew it, too. Hawkins, though, is still an impulsive and overconfident rookie, and he doesn’t truly understand what he’s up against.
Jules cautions him in Cape Town, keeps him from breaking down the door because recklessness will only get them in trouble. But then Carmen leaves the scene in her chopper, and Hawkins is livid.
“What were you thinking, Jules?!” he cries. “Did you want her to get away?!”
He doesn’t really mean that, Jules knows, he’s just lashing out because he’s frustrated. But those words still hit her, somewhere deep inside.
So Jules dodges the question. She’s found herself doing that a lot with Hawkins.
~
What Carmen and Jules had wasn’t a romance.
They agreed on that from their very first kiss—Carmen was just doing what she wanted, and Jules wanted that, too. So they kissed, they fooled around, they made each other feel good, but the relationship was never serious. Sure, Jules was a little in love with Carmen, but loving Carmen also meant accepting that she was the type of person who could never be tied down to anyone.
So Carmen never opened up about herself, and Jules never asked her to. Jules never asked for anything more than what she got. Being Carmen’s partner was enough, and Jules was happy with their life together at ACME.
It never really occurred to her that maybe Carmen wasn’t.
Carmen had been MIA from ACME for a week when she announced the success of her very first heist via a video broadcast to the world. “I have stolen the Crown Jewels,” she proclaimed, and that was definitely Carmen on screen holding Cullinan I in her hand, her smug smile and twinkling eyes framed by a bright red fedora Jules had never seen her wear before. “And this is just the beginning. For I, Carmen Sandiego, am going to become the world’s greatest thief!”
The next morning, the Chief called Jules to her office, asked very seriously if Jules had ever noticed any signs that Carmen had been planning to defect. Jules told the truth: she hadn’t had a clue. Protocol demanded that Jules be taken off all her cases and thoroughly vetted anyway, but for what it was worth, Chief seemed to believe her.
Nobody else did, though.
“Maybe she and Sandiego had a fight,” her coworkers whispered amongst themselves, when they either didn’t know Jules could hear or didn’t care that she could. “There must be something Argent isn’t telling us. I mean, how couldn’t she know? She was her partner.”
Jules vowed to be the one to capture Carmen Sandiego, if only to prove to her peers that it wasn’t her fault. That just because she’d been Carmen’s partner didn’t mean she’d been anything more. She’d certainly never been Carmen’s confidant. Perhaps she’d never even been Carmen’s friend—
Except, Jules remembered: Carmen once took her to the top of the Eiffel Tower on one of their nights off, and kissed her breathless as they watched the Paris lights. Carmen once agreed to try all of Jules’s favorite restaurants in Chengdu, persevering even as her face flushed red because Jules liked her food much spicier than Carmen did. Carmen once went undercover as a musician for a case, and for a moment as she performed on stage, strumming her guitar and singing a love song in her native Brazilian Portuguese, she stared right at Jules’s spot in the audience and for those beautiful three seconds, it felt like the song was just for her.
...Okay, so maybe Jules was more than a little in love with Carmen.
(And maybe the idea of locking Carmen behind bars was just as painful as her coworkers’ censure, if not more.)
~
“You’re practically burning holes in your journal,” Hawkins tells Jules, during the plane ride to Germany right after retrieving the Mayan calendar. “What are you thinking about?”
Jules looks up from the entries she was reading: the ones from the mission where they retrieved the Mok’o fish gong. “I’m remembering the wolf statue in Quebec, and that Sorbonne poster in Paris.” The proof that Carmen Sandiego donated a lot of money to causes she cared about. “There is some good in Carmen,” Jules murmurs, an echo of what she said back in Mexico.
“There was some good in Carmen Sandiego,” Hawkins says. “I’ll believe that much. But Jules, she’s not your partner anymore. The past is the past. You need to focus on now, on this case.”
“I am focused on this case,” Jules insists. “If...if I can just figure out Carmen’s reasons for doing all this, I can figure out what she’ll do next.”
“Figure out...” Hawkins repeats, and something seems to click into place in his mind. “You don’t actually know why she left ACME, do you?”
Jules might as well admit it to him now. “I really don’t. When it happened, it surprised me as much as anybody.”
She’s half-expecting Hawkins to express disbelief like everyone else: How couldn’t you know? You were Carmen’s partner. But instead, he just cocks his head to the side and asks, “In that case, what makes you so sure she even had a reason?”
“...It’s Carmen,” Jules says, unable to produce a better answer. “There must have been a reason.”
Hawkins doesn’t really seem convinced at all, but he doesn’t push the subject any further.
Jules appreciates that.
~
Jules knew Carmen better than anyone else did. That didn’t necessarily mean she knew Carmen well, but at the very least, she was positive that Carmen wanted to make the world a better place. Whenever Carmen had talked about conserving the environment, about preserving world cultures, about learning from the past so that we may improve the future, there was real, undeniable passion there.
But the Carmen who Jules knew, the Carmen who had wanted nothing more than to do good—how in the world had she become the Carmen who stole, who laughed at the law, who left taunting and sometimes cruel messages behind?
Hello Julia. Still trying to prove yourself?
Maybe you’ve lost your edge, Jules.
You’ll learn, Agent Hawkins, that Julia can get quite frustrated at times. Not to mention opinionated.
The remarks hurt, honestly, but they also just didn’t make sense. Carmen hadn’t cared enough about Jules to stay, obviously, but...she had cared. Jules knew Carmen leaving ACME had never been about her, yet now, Carmen was acting as if she had something personal against Jules all of a sudden.
It’s almost as if, a voice whispered in the back of Jules’s mind, Carmen is trying to make you hate her.
And when Jules thought about it like that, she realized: if the Carmen she knew had, for whatever reason, believed she could somehow better the world by making herself into the villain...
She would have.
One hundred percent, she would have.
~
“Maybe she masterminded these thefts so the whole world could benefit,” Jules ponders aloud, after Carmen escapes her and Hawkins in the lost city. Even as she says it, she knows there’s no proof. There’s nothing there but her own intuition, and maybe too much hope, and a love for Carmen that will never truly be able to leave her heart.
Hawkins doesn’t believe it. The Chief probably doesn’t either. And even if Jules ever caught up to Carmen, even if Jules ever managed to pin her down long enough to ask if her theory was correct, Carmen would never answer her honestly.
That’s just who Carmen is. And Jules will just have to live with that.
“I still think Carmen Sandiego is a bad apple. Rotten to the core,” Hawkins says, because he and Jules don’t agree on a lot of things and will likely never agree on Carmen. But even so, his can-do attitude as the Chief reports Carmen’s next heist is contagious, invigorating. It honestly makes Jules feel better.
Carmen would never answer Jules honestly. But there is still the possibility that Jules could find out the truth for herself.
So, with the chase back on and her confidence renewed, Jules turns to Shadow and smiles.
