Carmen Sandiego, international fugitive and head of V.I.L.E., has hatched a
brand new scheme. Using her latest invention, the Babble-On Laser, Carmen
seeks to destroy communication by rendering languages into incoherent
gibberish. The ACME Detective Agency, once again attempts to stop Carmen
Sandiego by finding the location of the Tower of Babbel. Already twelve Agents
have been lost and only Agent 13 remains to put together clues using Acme’s
latest interface, the CyberCom 2000.

As Agent 13, your main goal is to rescue the previous 12 agents and stop
Carmen Sandiego. You do this by gathering individual keys to rescue each of
the agents. These keys in turn are guarded by several passwords, all of which
must be decoded. These passwords are decoded by discovering “clues” in
Carmen’s hideouts which then launch anyone of 5 mini-game..

These mini-game sequences are the following:

* Code Breaker : Using a series of letter tiles, the player must spell specific words already chosen (Searcher Mode) or create new words that are present inside Word Detective’s dictionary (Builder Mode).
* Fusion Chamber : The player must find the meaning of a core word, the meaning of a prefix or suffix, and the meaning of the combined word.
* Micropix : The player is given a page of text with several nouns, verbs and adjectives missing. The most logical choices must be placed in these missing areas.
* Power Pack: Words must be placed in alphabetical order to form a tower on the right side of the screen
* Spellanyzer : The player is given an audio recording of a word, as well as it’s usage in a phrase and must either unscramble or spell the indicated word.

Progress for individual or total players is kept and may be printed out or
compared as an aid to teachers.