Crime Lab, database and notebook: Europe's paperwork
Where in Europe split the detective's desk into three tools, and the one Brøderbund billed as new was a searchable file of flags, currencies and languages.
The back of the Where in Europe box (1988) reads like a briefing file, and its “Investigative Tools” list names three: Rand McNally’s Concise Atlas of Europe, a “new on-line Data Base” that “provides additional information on European nations to help solve clues,” and a “Computerized Crimestopper’s Notebook.” A telex on the same panel, from a resigning Agent M-22, states the doctrine: “The best weapon at our disposal is information.”
The field menu
Every stop offers four commands: Investigate, Use Notebook, Visit Crime Lab and Go to Airport. Investigate opens the three sources (Question Witness, Search Scene, Call Tipster). Not every lead comes from the street, though. Some identity hints arrive as telegrams and notes from the Chief, which Computist’s Jeff Hurlburt counted as the game’s weakness, since it made “the hunt seem a bit less realistic.”
Inside the Crime Lab
The Crime Lab is where the paperwork gets processed. In the MS-DOS release its menu reads Enter Crime Notes, Search Database, Return to Scene and Save Case. Enter Crime Notes passes what you have logged in the Notebook (sex, hair and eye colour, a taste in films or books) to the lab’s computer, which issues a warrant only once a single suspect is left standing. Edit the notes afterwards and a warrant already on file can be voided; see Interpol and the warrant clerk. Save Case keeps one game per detective name.
The database
Search Database (Use Database in the Commodore 64 version) is the novelty. Commodore Magazine described it in August 1989 as three icons: “a flag, a bag with a money sign, and a cartoon cloud with ‘Oui’ inside.” Flag, currency and language, in other words, searchable on screen instead of only in print. One MS-DOS capture shows a query in progress with the drachma and Gaelic filled in side by side, a pairing no country on the 1988 map could satisfy.
The atlas keeps its job for everything the three fields do not cover, from borders to landmarks, and the same review tells stumped players to look answers up in it. For how the series used its books as a gate, see the reference book as a required move.
The reward
The Software Publishers Association liked the arrangement enough to give Where in Europe two of its 1989 Excellence in Software awards, Best Social Studies/Science Program and Best Home Learning Program, as Compute! reported in August 1989.