PRIVATE LIVES : COMPUTER GAME REVIEW : For Sale: The ‘Mona Lisa’ : Millennium Auction lets you bid on some of the world’s treasured artworks and curios, including Nixon’s 18 missing minutes.

Here we are again in the future with a CD-ROM game that features exotic opponents, high-tech gadgets and brutal battles.

But for once, the setting is neither outer space nor a post-nuclear landscape. This futuristic actioner takes place in one of the most vicious of real-life settings--an art auction house.

Millennium Auction is the first in a planned series of CD-ROM games by the Eidolon company in New York targeting an adult audience.

The game takes place in the year 2011 at a high-stakes auction of some of the world’s most treasured artworks and curios, including the “Mona Lisa,” the “Pieta,” the missing 18 minutes of Richard Nixon’s White House audiotape, “The Scream,” Mann’s Chinese Theatre (the last movie theater in the country) and a robotic sex partner.

The on-screen players come from a variety of backgrounds and situations, including an African American opera diva, a Saudi Arabian developer and a German art critic. These exotic-looking bidders seemingly share only one attribute in common: None cares about the aesthetics or historical value of the items on the block.

The sole objective of Millennium Auction is to acquire works that will increase in value and can be sold during the course of the game at a substantial profit. The winner, declared at the end of a 12-item auction sale, is the player with the most cash.

Millennium Auction might be billed as futuristic, but it seems nostalgic for the 1980s.

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My buddy Aaron and I play a round to try out the game. We are first directed to pick who we would like to be from a list of seven bidders. Aaron chooses to take on the persona of Chanteena, the opera singer. I become Takeshi Mori, described as a “Japanese cyberpunk entrepreneur.”

The computer picks two additional players (an auction round requires a total of four)--”arrogant American financier” Randall Smith and German art critic Dieter Haas, who would be very much at home on “Sprockets.”

Let the back-stabbing begin.

We are welcomed by the animated hostess, Nuria, a creepy and completely dour “bidder liaison” who speaks of the “unholy marriage of art and money.” We enter the gallery, where the bidders are depicted as standing among the artworks, engaged in pre-auction conversation.

By clicking on them with the mouse, we overhear snippets of gossip. It seems some of the pieces up for auction are of questionable authenticity and others are in danger of falling in value. More information is gained from clicking on a newscast and from clicking into the maintenance office where Zeke, the kindly janitor, has access to some inside skinny.

Then it’s off to the bidding room for the action part of the game. All bidders start with an $8.5-million stake to make bids. Objects come onto the block and a lively on-screen auctioneer kicks off the bidding.

Aaron and I hit designated keys on the keyboard when we want to make a bid. The computer controls the bidding of Randall and Dieter. The idea is to try to get objects you want at a reasonable price while bidding up other objects in hopes of depleting your opponents’ funds.

You are never quite sure when the computer-controlled bidders will quit, suddenly leaving you stuck with paying for an item you don’t want.

As the game progresses, news events can bolster or deplete the value of the objects in your possession.

Millennium Auction is an attempt to capture the interest of the same adult gamers who enjoy the challenge of Monopoly or Pictionary--games of skill and chance that can be played in groups. Millennium Auction is not as engaging as those two games--its game-play is not as straightforward and parts are frustratingly repetitive and slow.

On the plus side, Millennium Auction has wonderful visuals and occasional bits of humor far more sophisticated than the CD-ROM norm. It’s an admirable, nicely stylized first try at what could be an interesting genre for CD-ROM games.

By the way, the two computer bidders came out ahead of both Aaron/Chanteena and me/Takeshi. I came in last but am now the proud owner of Hokusai’s “View of Mr. Fuji” woodcut and the last surviving swordfish on Earth.