The other James Bond game published by Nintendo. Released in 1998 (the same year the Game Boy Color came out), this quietly drifted by and is mostly forgotten now. I must admit that I didn’t expect that much from this game – with the generic title and releasing quite late in the original Game Boy’s life, I had my own biased expectations: this was probably just a basic side scrolling shooter.

Unfortunately, while some Game Boy games were suited to palettes and would automatically load them to have colour on a Super Game Boy or Game Boy Color, James Bond on Game Boy remains entirely black and white – possibly none of the combinations of colours worked for the game, so you have to make do with an entirely monochrome experience.

However, my disappointment wavered when I realised that this wasn’t just a lazy side scrolling shooter/platformer: It’s a Bond adventure that takes some cues from Zelda (particularly Link’s Awakening). You collect items and weapons, using them to progress he game and fight. From the select screen, you can assign these items (as well as Bond’s punch and block abilities) to the A and B buttons.

The game starts out in a Chinese village, the way is blocked by a broken bridge and you have to find a the repairman’s hammer to fix it – this serves as a simple but effective introduction to finding and using items. From here, you investigate the temples village looking for clues of an international smuggling ring, where you have to fight Zhong Mae, the dojo sensei and the Bond Girl of this adventure, then fight your way though villages before escaping on a boat.

Returning to MI6 headquarters, you get your next mission from M and gadgets from Q, where you can mess around with a few thing (much to Q’s dismay). The dialogue in this game is simple but charming, and captures the spirit of the characters surprisingly well, and the structure of the plot fits the style of Bond films, with lots of neat little touches that just adds to the charm of the game.

You get sent to Kurdistan to investigate the disappearance of 008, who was investigating the warlord currently in control of the region. One absolutely tiny detail fascinated me: a flies. They’re only three pixels flapping about, but such a tiny detail just helps make the game more alive. You’ll be using a lot of trading and solving a few puzzles here before finding and defeating the warlord and getting information that Oddjob is operating out of a market in Marrakech.

This was my favourite level. It’s quite vast with three parts to it: luring a middleman to a casino, finding a diamond and searching catacombs for a “ratman”. This level is where the “maze-like” structure starts to crop up, but the levels aren’t so expansive, so you can learn how to navigate them. In the casino, you need to make money playing Blackjack, Baccarat and Red Dog in order to reach the high earners table and attack the attention of the man who never wins.

In the market, you take part in a large trading cats, where you end up with all sorts of things in your inventory, such as a cat. When you first explore the area, you’ll get hints so when do you find items, you’ll have an idea of where you’ll need them. The catacombs are more combat-based, where you’ll need to find a secret entrance to what is very clearly a brothel (but portrayed in a kid-friendly way), the “ratman” and also a back door to the casino.

Once you’ve done all this, you’ll gain access to Oddjob’s room, where Bond is unequipped to deal with him. Before you die, Oddjob decides that it’s more fun to have Bond be trapped in the desert, near an oasis but too far to get anywhere without being able to carry water. Luckily for Bond, a man on a camel happens to pass buy with a spare canteen, and then MI6 contacts him to let him know that there’s a nearby airfield. If you found the satellite map on the previous level, it’s easy to follow the coordinates. If not, you’ll have to wander around until you find it.

The next place is investigating another temple in Tibet, where you have to find objects to help you scale a mountain to the temple at the top. Here the game gets a bit more combat heavy, with less attention on the puzzle side, which is a bit disappointing, but still fun. Once you make it to the temple, you have to fights far too many rooms of sumo wrestlers, only for it to be a trap as Bond gets taken to Oddjob’s secret base.

This is where Zhong Mae makes a reappearance, breaking Bond out because she’s realised that letting these smuggle to help her village is actually something much, much bigger than she expected. She goes off to disable the base’s security as you need to reequip, find a way to counter Oddjob’s attack and finally defeat him, getting him to tell you who is behind everything. Oddjob doesn’t know, but lets you know of a middleman that does, back in Kurdistan.

In the power vacuum caused by getting rid of the previous warlord, war has broken out. Scattered around are dead bodies being picked apart by birds, a pretty grim sight for a Nintendo-published Game Boy game. After fighting both warring leaders (one fighting to the death and the other being an abject coward), Bond finds who it is and where their secret base is located.

The final section of the game is much more combat orientated, with the only puzzles being playing with switches until you get the right combination (made clear by a Bond theme jingle). I’m not sure if this is the intended way, or if I missed a clue somewhere. After defeating the villain, you have to make it past his defences to stop his missiles from launching, as wall as saving Zhong Mae (who got fed up of waiting for Bond and found out the base’s location on her own).

The game ends in regular Bond fashion, and there’s also a secret ending: if you mess about in Q’s lab, you can find a hidden item, this item unlocks the final scene. The credits also give you some codes that allow you to play the card games by entering the codes as names when creating a save file.

James Bond on Game Boy is fairly short, but is far more than it ever needed to be. It’s very enjoyable and captures the spirit of a Bond adventure as a whole more than any other Bond game. I’d love to see a modern interpretation of this style of game for James Bond – there’s more to the character than just shooting everyone.

A remarkable game this 007 on Game Boy, made by people with a history of uncommonly ambitious projects that try to do more than the bare minimum (Robin Hood on NES, Oddworld Adventures, Super Star Wars).

For all intents and purposes, a James Bond game on a Nintendo handheld could safely have been a run of the mill platformer without anything special and receive no particular complaints. Absolutely no one was expecting these developers to instead make a 007-themed Zelda meets MSX Metal Gear, and you have to commend them for it.

You have the top-down view, the item management with the two slots set to the A and B buttons, you run around talking to people, trading objects and finding secrets in order to proceed. Bond can punch, block, use a machete and a variety of firearms, explosives and Q workshop tools. There is even a fully featured suite of casino minigames.

It doesn't always work, alternating pretty solid mechanics, presentation and even writing with some obtuse game design here and there, along with stupid difficulty spikes later on. Still, it is such a cool curiousity that this even exists that it's shame not to take a look at it.