One of the most shameful developments in game design is the way how Sid Meier, over the years, has changed from a brilliant pioneer who was able to integrate complex designs with fun and engaging gameplay, to a jaded figurehead who believes that gamers are too stupid to think on their own.

Covert Action requires you to remember a complex set of clues after an action sequence? Too complicated, streamline it.

Civ4 has situations where units die after a 95% chance of success was displayed? Players are too dumb to understand probabilities, give them an autowin.

Players could try to change the foundation of their civilization at any time in Civ4? They can't handle so much freedom of choice, limit their options.

This is precisely why many old games are still great: They actually saw the player as a thinking entity and not just as a driveling idiot whose only skill is to shell out money for whichever "streamlined" product the marketing department is shoving down his throat.

(Sorry. Sore topic. I'll get back to being friendly now, promise! ;) )

Thanks. But now I'm waiting for the manual to see which keys are already assigned to a function.

Maybe I should have been clearer that for me "not entirely wrong" means "80% wrong".

The 20% right in this is that applying that doctrine gave us Railroad Tycoon , CIV II & Civ III.

I tend to agree that Sid has failed to age well.

YEAAAAAH! I LOVE THIS GAME!

Been looking forward to this. My old floppies are useless and hopefully this fixes everything. Instabought.

Hey, my version of this game has always been plagued with random freezes that led to wasting hours of gameplay (game had to be restarted, and a mission can't be saved midway). Has this been addressed somehow?

'puts on preacher hat'

Excuse me sir, do you have a minute to talk about our lord and savior Johan Clancy?

Well Johan Andersson and Tom Clancy, both have released some amazing games through their publishing companies Paradox Interactive and Ubisoft respectively. Paradox release games like Europa Univeralis, and Hearts of Iron, and the Tom Clancy series released games like Splinter Cell, and Ghost Recon. Definitely thinking games, and you will fail repeatedly before getting into the hang of things. Then you'll only fail some of the time. Get the older versions of the Tom Clancy games, and the newer versions of the Paradox Interactive games.

I actually hoped this would be the Sid Meier release as I'm no strategist fan. I'll likely get it in a future sale.

I was hoping this would get released. Breaking in and snooping around was my favorite part. It always ended with bullets and grenades. Thanks GOG!

I've never even heard of this game before! looks very interesting, with fun good old gameplay, perfect as a GOG release. *two thumbs up* Added to wishlist for now, will definitely pick this up somewhere in the future.

Seems like Sid Meier wasn't really satisfied with this game:

"The mistake I think I made in Covert Action is actually having two games in there kind of competing with each other. There was kind of an action game where you break into a building and do all sorts of picking up clues and things like that, and then there was the story which involved a plot where you had to figure out who the mastermind was and the different roles and what cities they were in, and it was a kind of an involved mystery-type plot.
I think, individually, those each could have been good games. Together, they fought with each other. You would have this mystery that you were trying to solve, then you would be facing this action sequence, and you'd do this cool action thing, and you'd get on the building, and you'd say, "What was the mystery I was trying to solve?" Covert Action integrated a story and action poorly, because the action was actually too intense. In Pirates!, you would do a sword fight or a ship battle, and a minute or two later, you were kind of back on your way. In Covert Action, you'd spend ten minutes or so of real time in a mission, and by the time you got out of [the mission], you had no idea of what was going on in the world.
So I call it the "Covert Action Rule". Don't try to do too many games in one package. And that's actually done me a lot of good. You can look at the games I've done since Civilization, and there's always opportunities to throw in more stuff. When two units get together in Civilization and have a battle, why don't we drop out to a war game and spend ten minutes or so in duking out this battle? Well, the Covert Action Rule. Focus on what the game is."

But I like it the way it is.

Amen to that. I hate being treated like an idiot and having the game hold my hand or funnel me through, pointing out the landmarks and sights as I go. I want to figure things out for myself, thank you very much. There's a guy on YouTube that posts a lot of reviews (I forget his name, but he's got a NZ/Aussie accent and says "fuck" an awful lot. I can't stand him or his "reviews," because he plays the way modern developers (well, more publishers, but I digress) assume that gamers think. He did one of System Shock, and he spent something like 5 minutes running around the first little area, clicking furiously at every surface going "durrr, I don't know what the fuck's going on here, what the fuck?!??" because he couldn't be bothered to stop, look, and go "hmm, I wonder what this little flashing icon on my screen means" or "hmm, there seems to be a keypad by this door, I wonder how I might go about finding the code?"

There was another one even worse, where all he did was cuss at the screen because he couldn't understand what was going on, and a commenter summed it up best: "You should try not sucking before you review a game."

YESSS! I wanted to play this game for years now and I thought Sid Meier was keeping a lid on it somehow to prevent its re-release. Guess I was wrong! Thank you Tommo and GOG!

Seriously, I will buy this game only for the manual

My favorite part was (and still is) the cryptograms! You can choose to "train" on any of the 4 mini-games rather than play a campaign, so I would just enter the game and play one crypto after another. They can still be rather challenging! If you like that sort of puzzle, it's great just for that!

And my 2nd favorite is the circuit tracing. Kinda reminds me of that old Pipe Dream game, where you're flipping tiles to keep the "sludge" flowing? Only this is really different... you are swapping "logic chips" with different input/output paths to get the current to flow without tripping alarms. Also a lot of fun, just by itself.

Part of your description reminds me of "Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego", mainly the randomized plots and you traveling everywhere to unravel it. You also had a certain level of freedom to gather clues or not. The minigames part, however, that's somewhat different to every Carmem Sandiego I ever played.

Also Covert Action seems way more mature while WitWiCS was sorta aimed to kids.

Surprise! MicroProse backlog on way to GOG ;)