To rescue her lover and co-agent Walls from the foreign embassy where he is imprisoned, the legendary dancer and spy has to evade or shoot down guards and sentry bots, get pass codes at gunpoint from embassy employees, blow up safes and do other typical action stuff in this Loriciels game, originally released 1988 for the Amstrad CPC. The emphasis is not on combat, if you know how, you can beat it without killing anyone.
The next year an Atari ST version followed that had been recoded from scratch. It removed some of the crassest anachronisms, the sentry bots are still there but the diskettes that open doors have been replaced with keys. The original graphics had restricted themselves to four colors to allow for a higher resolution (red, yellow and a flesh tone on a black background, making the game look more like a Spectrum than an Amstrad game), now they do the lush belle epoque environment justice. A Mucha-style title screen has been added and instead of starting right in the embassy, Mata Hari walks across a garden first. There were gameplay changes too: if she gets shot and winds up in the hospital, she has to fight a guard before she can resume her adventure.
Not everybody was happy with the remake. There were some glitches
that were absent in the original, some thought Mata Hari was sexier
on the CPC, and the ending scene was toned down (the screenshot to
the right shows the CPC ending).
Apart from that there are a few minor inconsistencies:
The graphic artists (there were three of them) could not agree
what hair color Mata Hari is supposed to have: on the title screen
she is blonde, on the border a redhead, while her sprite has black
hair. In real life she was a brunette. The most scurillous detail
is probably that the guards in what is supposed to be a foreign
embassy wear uniforms that look definitely French.
The game is fondly remembered in France but recieved very little recognition elsewhere. You will find it listed on most CPC and ST sites, but detailed information and reviews I found only in French.—Mata Hari, BTW, is one of the few games that were ported neither to the PC, nor to the Amiga.
