myau56 wrote:I've never heard of this game before !
Seems to be great ! Is it ?
Okay, history lesson! Appropriate, since this is an educational game.
While edutainment games do not have the best reputation, there are a few which actually hold up as games, and those are usually from the mid-'80s through early '90s. There's the Oregon Trail, the Castle of Dr. Brain, and the Carmen Sandiego series, starting with Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, pictured above (I originally had the 1985 Apple II version- the one up there is the enhanced re-release of the original game). WitW originally shipped in this huge box which had two full-sized reference books, a World Almanac and the Facts Book.
The reason it worked was that the education was well-integrated into the framing device. The core gameplay loop is quite simple- you're informed that there has been a heist of some valuable national treasure from some country or another, which is where you start the case, and so you need to talk to witnesses in order to get the clues you need to successfully trail whichever member of Carmen Sandiego's gang of international thieves as well as get identifying information that will get you a warrant for their arrest. The reason the game comes with a World Almanac is that you need to reference it to properly interpret the clues, because the clues to the next country you need to go to are basic real-world facts about the next country's currency, geography, culture, or history (i.e. "A suspicious person came here and exchanged his money for Francs", "She said she wanted to take pictures of some Magyar artifacts"). Successfully follow the thief through enough countries, and you get to corner them and have a chance to make the arrest, which succeeds if you got the correct warrant. This continues until you've solved enough cases (usually around 25-30 or so) to force Carmen Sandiego into the open, which gives you the chance to pursue and arrest her directly.
Granted, I don't have the World Almanac anymore, but Wikipedia works just as well.