Agent U.S.A. (Commodore 64)

Agent USA is very simplistic game for the Commodore 64 that had a somewhat bizarre idea behind it.

You are a secret agent, and your job is to track down and eliminate something known as the “FuzzBomb”. You travel across the U.S., moving from city to city as you attempt to locate the area that the FuzzBomb has infected.I’m not exactly sure what the FuzzBomb is, but it infects innocent people and turns them into mindless “zombies”, where they are unable to control their own movements and simply wander around aimlessly, infecting other people that they touch.

Your only weapon against the FuzzBomb and people who have been “fuzzed”, are magical “diamonds”. When someone who has been fuzzed comes into contact with one of the diamonds, they revert back to their normal selves. You start off with 10 diamonds, and you can grow more by simply dropping them on the ground and letting them multiply. However, other civilians will try to steal your diamonds if you leave them out in the open so you have to be careful.

The characters in this game are simply big ass cowboy hats with little legs coming out from underneath them. The civilians all have black hats, whereas you have a white hat.

You travel between the cities by train. You have to go to a ticket booth to buy tickets (or you can hop on a train at the last second). Some of the bigger cities have express trains. I love travelling between cities on the train because the music is so damn catchy. One cool thing about this game is that it’s kind of educational. It helps to teach you a bit of geography because you learn where various different U.S. cities are located on the map, and you learn which cities are the state capitals! Bonus!

I don’t think I ever beat the game when I was younger, and I still haven’t been able to beat it yet. It’s actually pretty difficult, because if you get touched by someone who has been fuzzed, your diamond count gets depleted. If you have zero diamonds and you get touched, you actually get fuzzed yourself. The strange thing is, the game doesn’t end there. You simply lose all control of your character, and you have to sit back and watch him wander aimlessly from city to city like all of the other civilians. If you wait long enough, you may actually gain control of your character because some of the civilians carry diamonds as well.

I never really thought much about this game when I was younger, but now that I look back at it, it’s pretty weird. You really gotta wonder where people come up with these ideas sometimes. Anyways, it’s certainly not the best game ever made, but it has a lot of small details built into it that kept me playing for hours. Back in the day that is. — Sean