Spycraft

If you want to gauge the current state of pop-spy culture, look at the the high-tech shenanigans of Clear and Present Danger — a movie whose main attractions were its surveillance satellites and laser-guided missiles, not Harrison Ford. So it's no surprise that these electronic fetishes would end up on a computer screen in Spycraft: The Great Game, an interactive thriller so loaded with lethal gizmos and spook-speak that playing it is like breaking into CIA headquarters and spending the night trying out all the toys.

In Spycraft, you assume the role of Agent Thorn, a CIA newbie who's summoned (rather unbelievably) to work on a big case: A Russian presidential candidate has been assassinated in Red Square, and it's possible that the rogue CIA agent who did the job has his sights set on the U.S. President. Thanks to the ingenuity of Activision's programmers, who employ a variety of you-are-there film formats, you inhabit the part very convincingly while being barraged with videophone calls, E-mail messages, and live-action dressings-down by ticked off superiors.

Activision's publicity campaign for Spycraft hypes the involvement of ex-CIA director William Colby and onetime KGB Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin, who provided some inside details on intelligence operations and pop up on screen periodically to offer advice. But the real allure of this game is its emphasis on brainy Beltway analysis, as typified by the creepy sequence in which you use a ''Kennedy Assassination Tool'' to chart the path of the Red Square assassin's bullet; process a grainy photograph of the assailant in a suspect-identification program; and, in a gruesome touch, deduce the weapon used to blow off half the candidate's head. The apparent realism of the game seems almost beside the point; the only measure of a great game is whether it keeps you glued to your PC, and in this respect, Spycraft faithfully fulfills its mission. A