Cube1701
2000
The must surprising thing about 007 Racing is the complete lack of one thing: Racing. This is a vehicle combat game with missions you need to complete. With the game utilising multiple famous Bond cars, you might then expect to be a “greatest hits” of Bond car movements, but this is a new story (a very dull one, mostly in told via walls of texts in briefings) that doesn’t even attempt to justify why these cars are being used.
Developed by Eutechnyx, who are now best known for the infamous Ride to Hell: Retribution, this takes an interesting concept (a vehicle-based Bond game) and butchers it in every way possible.
Starting off with a mission where you have to cancel the Bond Girl from a courtyard and escape, I was able to adapt the controls – as this lets you use the right analogue stick for acceleration/breaking, I was able to map it to the analogue triggers.
You start the level off with a machine gun, all the other weapons and gadgets (mainly health and shields) are scattered across the map. Your main weapons for stronger targets (like tanks) are hellfire missiles, but these damage your car whenever you fire them, and aiming them is a pain (they alternate what side of your car they fire from, which changes their aiming). Special missiles are required to take down a helicopter – use it wrong and you need to restart.
Next, Bond is in New York and there’s a bomb on his car! You can’t to too slow or else it will blow up, you need to rush around following the Crazy Taxi arrow to collect…things to increase your time, then drive the car into a river. Incidentally, the simplicity of this mission makes it the most enjoyable in the game. The handling isn’t atrocious, but it doesn’t feel very natural or reliable.
This BMW also seems to handle exactly the same as the Austin Martin from the first, and as all weapons are pickups, none of the cars have any identity or special abilities, so the one thing this game might have going for it – the Bond cars – just strips away what makes them Bond cars.
The next level is one where you get ambushed and is in three parts. The first is simple: kill all enemies in a small arena. One thing to note is that foot soldiers never count as important targets, they just whittle down your health. You also can’t run them over, removing another potentially satisfying element from the game.
The second part of this level has forklifts driving at high speed and ramming into you. R (played by John Cleese) tells you to look for a weak point in their armour to exploit – this is a lie. This game has immensely unclear instructions, and you’ll fail many objectives simply because the game never makes it clear what you are supposed to do. The third part has you using an EMP to destroy “computers”. This is a weapon that shoots a little bit our of the right side of your car. I’ll be honest: this mission was so frustrating that I just started using cheats.
The next level has you shooting tires on a truck using lasers that fire out of the sides of the car.
The next three levels are set in the Mexican jungle. The first is fine, trying to keep ahead of a helicopter then hiding the car in a truck. The second has Bond taking on an enemy compound from within, using a device to blow up mines (which the enemy has oddly placed right next to all their artillery – the device to blow them up is just lying around), setting up a laser and escaping (although you have 10 seconds and no direction).
The third is almost a race – Xenia pops up out of nowhere. You need to race her while collecting objects, although the game doesn’t make this clear, so you’ll probably be fighting and then get a cutscene of Xenia escaping with a British parachute attached to her car. If you do beat her, make sure to pick up and use the parachute, or else you’ll just die. When you succeed, Xenia falls to the bottom of the pit and explodes, but obviously is fine by the time of GoldenEye.
The most annoying level is up next: you control a car remotely from warehouse cameras, planting mines. To make it more annoying, the cameras are low quality and fizz every now and then, and there are some tiny thing driving around.
Then you have to collect missiles and destroy a boat driven by Jaws, go close to limos in New York to collect data. The next mission sounds intriguing: take out an underwater base in the Lotus Esprit.
But then the level starts with Bond driving out of water. Using it is the same as all of the rest, and we have another tedious level that doesn’t utilise the car’s unique abilities in any way. R even clumsily explains that many of the underwater features were removed for weapons – but then the weapons are on the map, not on the car, so it still makes no sense.
The final mission is then horrendously designed. It sounds simple: destroy a plane’s engines, destroy the plane and escape off a cliff. The execution, however, is atrocious. You can’t use the car’s gun at this point (no idea why), so you have to ram the engines.
The engines are only vulnerable when they flash (there’s no shielding or reasoning for this), and there’s no consistency when you ram them. If it doesn’t work first time, the plane flies off and you have to start again. You have to do this with all four engines. After this, the plane turns around (very quickly) and rams you. This is where you use the car’s gun, except that instead of the usual method, you have a first person view to manually aim.
Where you start aiming seems completely random, it’s not ahead of you so you have a 50/50 chance of turning to the right direction. You have a few seconds to aim and shoot a little box hovering under the plane, and then very quickly dodge the plane and drive off a cliff (thankfully, you get an arrow for this). It’s by far the worst designed level in the game, and it’s the climax!
There’s also a multiplayer mode for two players. There ate two modes: shoot each other or ram into each other to pass a bomb over. These take place in small areas and aren’t much fun at all. Again, I’m completely baffled by the complete lack of racing.
A vehicle combat James Bond game isn’t a bad idea, even a racing game with classic Bond cars can be done well. This game, however, is just a complete mess that throws away everything unique about Bond’s cars.
Developed by Eutechnyx, who are now best known for the infamous Ride to Hell: Retribution, this takes an interesting concept (a vehicle-based Bond game) and butchers it in every way possible.
Starting off with a mission where you have to cancel the Bond Girl from a courtyard and escape, I was able to adapt the controls – as this lets you use the right analogue stick for acceleration/breaking, I was able to map it to the analogue triggers.
You start the level off with a machine gun, all the other weapons and gadgets (mainly health and shields) are scattered across the map. Your main weapons for stronger targets (like tanks) are hellfire missiles, but these damage your car whenever you fire them, and aiming them is a pain (they alternate what side of your car they fire from, which changes their aiming). Special missiles are required to take down a helicopter – use it wrong and you need to restart.
Next, Bond is in New York and there’s a bomb on his car! You can’t to too slow or else it will blow up, you need to rush around following the Crazy Taxi arrow to collect…things to increase your time, then drive the car into a river. Incidentally, the simplicity of this mission makes it the most enjoyable in the game. The handling isn’t atrocious, but it doesn’t feel very natural or reliable.
This BMW also seems to handle exactly the same as the Austin Martin from the first, and as all weapons are pickups, none of the cars have any identity or special abilities, so the one thing this game might have going for it – the Bond cars – just strips away what makes them Bond cars.
The next level is one where you get ambushed and is in three parts. The first is simple: kill all enemies in a small arena. One thing to note is that foot soldiers never count as important targets, they just whittle down your health. You also can’t run them over, removing another potentially satisfying element from the game.
The second part of this level has forklifts driving at high speed and ramming into you. R (played by John Cleese) tells you to look for a weak point in their armour to exploit – this is a lie. This game has immensely unclear instructions, and you’ll fail many objectives simply because the game never makes it clear what you are supposed to do. The third part has you using an EMP to destroy “computers”. This is a weapon that shoots a little bit our of the right side of your car. I’ll be honest: this mission was so frustrating that I just started using cheats.
The next level has you shooting tires on a truck using lasers that fire out of the sides of the car.
The next three levels are set in the Mexican jungle. The first is fine, trying to keep ahead of a helicopter then hiding the car in a truck. The second has Bond taking on an enemy compound from within, using a device to blow up mines (which the enemy has oddly placed right next to all their artillery – the device to blow them up is just lying around), setting up a laser and escaping (although you have 10 seconds and no direction).
The third is almost a race – Xenia pops up out of nowhere. You need to race her while collecting objects, although the game doesn’t make this clear, so you’ll probably be fighting and then get a cutscene of Xenia escaping with a British parachute attached to her car. If you do beat her, make sure to pick up and use the parachute, or else you’ll just die. When you succeed, Xenia falls to the bottom of the pit and explodes, but obviously is fine by the time of GoldenEye.
The most annoying level is up next: you control a car remotely from warehouse cameras, planting mines. To make it more annoying, the cameras are low quality and fizz every now and then, and there are some tiny thing driving around.
Then you have to collect missiles and destroy a boat driven by Jaws, go close to limos in New York to collect data. The next mission sounds intriguing: take out an underwater base in the Lotus Esprit.
But then the level starts with Bond driving out of water. Using it is the same as all of the rest, and we have another tedious level that doesn’t utilise the car’s unique abilities in any way. R even clumsily explains that many of the underwater features were removed for weapons – but then the weapons are on the map, not on the car, so it still makes no sense.
The final mission is then horrendously designed. It sounds simple: destroy a plane’s engines, destroy the plane and escape off a cliff. The execution, however, is atrocious. You can’t use the car’s gun at this point (no idea why), so you have to ram the engines.
The engines are only vulnerable when they flash (there’s no shielding or reasoning for this), and there’s no consistency when you ram them. If it doesn’t work first time, the plane flies off and you have to start again. You have to do this with all four engines. After this, the plane turns around (very quickly) and rams you. This is where you use the car’s gun, except that instead of the usual method, you have a first person view to manually aim.
Where you start aiming seems completely random, it’s not ahead of you so you have a 50/50 chance of turning to the right direction. You have a few seconds to aim and shoot a little box hovering under the plane, and then very quickly dodge the plane and drive off a cliff (thankfully, you get an arrow for this). It’s by far the worst designed level in the game, and it’s the climax!
There’s also a multiplayer mode for two players. There ate two modes: shoot each other or ram into each other to pass a bomb over. These take place in small areas and aren’t much fun at all. Again, I’m completely baffled by the complete lack of racing.
A vehicle combat James Bond game isn’t a bad idea, even a racing game with classic Bond cars can be done well. This game, however, is just a complete mess that throws away everything unique about Bond’s cars.
While Eurocom made the N64 version of The World Is Not Enough, Black Ops – the developers of Tomorrow Never Dies – still made the PlayStation version. From playing the games, it doesn’t seem like there was any cross development or sharing resources, both games were developed completely independnatly.
While TWINE on PlayStation is a first person shooter, it still feels a lot like Tomorrow Never Dies. The HUD (which I still can’t see properly) and controls from the previous game are still here, with the developers still not taking advantage of the PlayStation’s analogue sticks. I could create an dual stick FPS-like setup, but without the ability to look up and down (without manual aiming).
The game stars off in the bank but the layout is very different. You go up a lift and then down an oddly long corridor with a lot of cameras – these are a massive pain to shoot due to the game’s shoddy controls and I just gave up and accepted the extra guards. One thing also evident is that the levels in this games are small “rooms” with short loading screens when going through doors, which make the levels feel disjoined.
After this, you get some long clips from the film, as it skips through the attack on MI6 headquarters and we go and chase the assassin down some short, narrow London streets. At the end of this level, the game automatically selects the grapple watch to fire at the hot air balloon. This watch isn’t used to help level design, but instead just triggers cutscenes.
Next up is the game’s skiing level which is just really odd. You have full control of Bond’s movement, but his acceleration has been altered. You awkwardly shoot some enemies and start going own a slope – for around 4 seconds. Due to the game being made of lots of tiny areas, you need to go through a pipe and load the next area, so you get the awkward controls and none of the fun of actually going downhill for a decent amount of time.
Next up is a level that the N64 game skipped, as Bond infiltrate’s Zukovsky’s laughably small casino. This is both the best and worst level. There’s only a few room and your mission is to win money at blackjack, which is more enjoyable than the actual game. I did nearly have to restart this mission due to an NPC blocking a patch.
You also have to use Bond’s credit card lockpick to open a door, which is neat the first time but is used far too much and the animations for it are far too long.
Next up is this game’s stealth level. This takes place entirely inside Elektra’s house, as you “stealth” by running and punching guards. There are a few items you can turn on to distract them. The level design for this mission is just bizarre, as the house doesn’t feel like a house due to its nonsensical layout and completely lacking a front door.
You skip from here right to infiltrating Renard’s men, who are trying to steal a nuke. This level feels really strange as you have to sneak past guards (having to punch some out) as you sneak into an area where you were invited into.
Another mission that wasn’t in the N64 game (apart from a multiplayer level) is Elektra’s pipeline, as you try to reach a bomb. You have to shut off the oil and rescue hostages to reach another part of the facility, then protect Christmas Jones as she fixes an oil pipeline maintenance vehicle.
The “City of Walkways” is a single level in this game, and feels far less dynamic, with the helicopter fight being extremely dull and then it’s onto another chase level, which coincidentally involves a bomb being placed in a train station (this time in Istanbul instead of London).
After Bond gets captured, you get to see a lovey, large room with big windows transform into a tiny room in a dungeon. The film footage and game design don’t match in any way whatsoever and I don’t know why they included the torture chair – they could have omitted it and it would have seem like Bond had moved to the next room instead.
You need to go back and forth then fight a few bosses. The first requires you to unload a few rounds from your assault rifle, the second is immune to all of your weapons due to “special armour” (he’s wearing a suit) and you’re told that you need to throw his explosives back at him. Headshots don’t do anything and the game gives you a grenade launcher, which also does nothing. You can only kill him by throwing his own pipe bombs. It’s just odd.
The final mission is on the submarine as you chase Renard. You have to navigate a really strange room filled with toxic barrels. When you reach Renard, you have a boss fight – but not against him, but against a reactor instead. There’s no flooding, and then you run back through the level.
The ending to the level isn’t locked away this time, however there is a secret video if you complete the game on the highest difficulty – which is just the sex scene from the end of the film. There are a few cheats to unlock, but there’s no multiplayer.
It’s amazing just how different these two games are, with the N64 version of the game being a much better game all around. The PlayStation version is stiff and disjointed.
While TWINE on PlayStation is a first person shooter, it still feels a lot like Tomorrow Never Dies. The HUD (which I still can’t see properly) and controls from the previous game are still here, with the developers still not taking advantage of the PlayStation’s analogue sticks. I could create an dual stick FPS-like setup, but without the ability to look up and down (without manual aiming).
The game stars off in the bank but the layout is very different. You go up a lift and then down an oddly long corridor with a lot of cameras – these are a massive pain to shoot due to the game’s shoddy controls and I just gave up and accepted the extra guards. One thing also evident is that the levels in this games are small “rooms” with short loading screens when going through doors, which make the levels feel disjoined.
After this, you get some long clips from the film, as it skips through the attack on MI6 headquarters and we go and chase the assassin down some short, narrow London streets. At the end of this level, the game automatically selects the grapple watch to fire at the hot air balloon. This watch isn’t used to help level design, but instead just triggers cutscenes.
Next up is the game’s skiing level which is just really odd. You have full control of Bond’s movement, but his acceleration has been altered. You awkwardly shoot some enemies and start going own a slope – for around 4 seconds. Due to the game being made of lots of tiny areas, you need to go through a pipe and load the next area, so you get the awkward controls and none of the fun of actually going downhill for a decent amount of time.
Next up is a level that the N64 game skipped, as Bond infiltrate’s Zukovsky’s laughably small casino. This is both the best and worst level. There’s only a few room and your mission is to win money at blackjack, which is more enjoyable than the actual game. I did nearly have to restart this mission due to an NPC blocking a patch.
You also have to use Bond’s credit card lockpick to open a door, which is neat the first time but is used far too much and the animations for it are far too long.
Next up is this game’s stealth level. This takes place entirely inside Elektra’s house, as you “stealth” by running and punching guards. There are a few items you can turn on to distract them. The level design for this mission is just bizarre, as the house doesn’t feel like a house due to its nonsensical layout and completely lacking a front door.
You skip from here right to infiltrating Renard’s men, who are trying to steal a nuke. This level feels really strange as you have to sneak past guards (having to punch some out) as you sneak into an area where you were invited into.
Another mission that wasn’t in the N64 game (apart from a multiplayer level) is Elektra’s pipeline, as you try to reach a bomb. You have to shut off the oil and rescue hostages to reach another part of the facility, then protect Christmas Jones as she fixes an oil pipeline maintenance vehicle.
The “City of Walkways” is a single level in this game, and feels far less dynamic, with the helicopter fight being extremely dull and then it’s onto another chase level, which coincidentally involves a bomb being placed in a train station (this time in Istanbul instead of London).
After Bond gets captured, you get to see a lovey, large room with big windows transform into a tiny room in a dungeon. The film footage and game design don’t match in any way whatsoever and I don’t know why they included the torture chair – they could have omitted it and it would have seem like Bond had moved to the next room instead.
You need to go back and forth then fight a few bosses. The first requires you to unload a few rounds from your assault rifle, the second is immune to all of your weapons due to “special armour” (he’s wearing a suit) and you’re told that you need to throw his explosives back at him. Headshots don’t do anything and the game gives you a grenade launcher, which also does nothing. You can only kill him by throwing his own pipe bombs. It’s just odd.
The final mission is on the submarine as you chase Renard. You have to navigate a really strange room filled with toxic barrels. When you reach Renard, you have a boss fight – but not against him, but against a reactor instead. There’s no flooding, and then you run back through the level.
The ending to the level isn’t locked away this time, however there is a secret video if you complete the game on the highest difficulty – which is just the sex scene from the end of the film. There are a few cheats to unlock, but there’s no multiplayer.
It’s amazing just how different these two games are, with the N64 version of the game being a much better game all around. The PlayStation version is stiff and disjointed.
While Tomorrow Never Dies skipped out on the Nintendo 64, The World Is Not Enough made a return, developed completely separately from the PlayStation version of the game. The N64 version of TWINE is heavily inspired by GoldenEye, following the same style of missions and level structure, but also tries to make the game more cinematic.
Eurocom managed to fit a lot onto the N64 controller. Jumping is now an option, and crouch is just one button. Through button combinations, you can switch between items and gadgets separately, as well as activate alternative fire modes for the guns. Looking up and down is a bit awkward as you either have to hold down the aim button, or use the D-pad (which is a little bit out of the way on an N64 controller) – but this means that it’s quite easy to reconfigure the game to fit a dual analogue controller.
Starting off with a nice simple tutorial level in a bank, this serves as a good introduction of the game’s mechanics, using gadgets and (on harder difficulties) erasing camera footage – this had a few extra objectives for harder difficulties, just like GoldenEye.
The cutscenes in this have voice overs (but not the actors from the films) and are recreated in the game engine, with the story being rewritten so that the game itself makes sense without having to have seen the film. I much prefer this way of doing things, as it helps keep the game’s identity throughout the whole thing.
Back at MI6 headquarters, not only does a bomb go off, but it gets invaded by goons, you have to fight them off, as well as putting out fires, protecting staff and enabling the security systems. It’s a really fun level, and is a great example of how the game expands upon scenes of the film.
After the boat chase (which you don’t get to play), you chase the assassin through docks along the Themes, a straightforward level that introduces the grapple function of the watch, which can be used in certain spaces to climb upwards, adding some verticality to some levels.
Taking advantage of the London setting, the assassin then proceeds into the Underground, having her goons take hostages and setting up a Bomb to try to slow Bond down. The trains are a bit crazy as you have to dodge them, but it’s very enjoyable, and you have to reach the assassin’s hot air balloon before she escapes.
The levels in The World Is Not Enough to a good job of feeling alive and like real locations. I would have liked a few that are less linear, but they’re still enjoyable.
Next up is a skiing mission, which is done in quite a simple way, feeling a bit like a light gun shooter. You can move left/right a bit and can speed up and slow down. There are a few targets that you need to hit, which can be a bit difficult and require restating the mission, which can be a bit annoying.
Next up is the main stealth mission – in most other missions, stealth is optional, but works quite well. Your watch has a “stun” function which, really, is utterly useless – it just makes enemies wiggle and it stops right after you stop firing it at them. Luckily, your watch has a dart which does knock enemies out – or you can punch them to sleep.
Here, you sneak around the grounds of Elektra’s house (and a little bit inside), tapping phones and taking photos of evidence. There are are few villains you need to avoid completely. I remember as a kid taking ages on this level, but once you have the guard patterns down, it isn’t too difficult.
The following two levels are probably the weakest, but still not bad. One has you chasing after a henchman to replace him, you can be stealthy or as loud as you want (just be prepared for a lot of enemies). Then you try to stop Renard from stealing a bomb, meeting up with Christmas Jones and escaping from an explosion.
The “cities of walkways” mission is split into two levels. The first is a fairly typical level as you fight some enemies to reach a computer containing evidence, while the second has you dodging helicopters with buzzsaws and is a great level, as you jump around on platforms that are being sliced then grab a fancy rocket launcher and guide missiles into an attacking chopper.
A few more decent levels follow as you chase a traitor though Istanbul, then you get captured and have to rescue M and kill Elektra, then it’s on to infiltrating Renard’s submarine. You start off on the docks and have to kill the guards efficiently enough to avoid them setting off the alarm. Then you climb into the submarine – with no loading screen, which I thought was impressive when the game came out in order to rescue Dr. Jones and disable the submarine controls.
The final level has a lot of swimming as you navigate the damaged submarine. The controls take some time to get used to, but it’s not so bad once you do – although as you had limited time in this mission, I think the game could have done with some swimming in an earlier mission.
You need to navigate through the submarine, kill Renard (which is similar to the film, they don’t force a boss encounter) and then escape, finishing the game.
The N64 version also has a multiplayer mode which is a lot of fun, complete with bots (although, strangely, you can’t play against bots on your own without cheats). Beating the main game on higher difficulties will unlock more characters to play as.
While it doesn’t reach the heights of GoldenEye, The World Is Not Enough is an extremely solid game and is a ton of fun.
Eurocom managed to fit a lot onto the N64 controller. Jumping is now an option, and crouch is just one button. Through button combinations, you can switch between items and gadgets separately, as well as activate alternative fire modes for the guns. Looking up and down is a bit awkward as you either have to hold down the aim button, or use the D-pad (which is a little bit out of the way on an N64 controller) – but this means that it’s quite easy to reconfigure the game to fit a dual analogue controller.
Starting off with a nice simple tutorial level in a bank, this serves as a good introduction of the game’s mechanics, using gadgets and (on harder difficulties) erasing camera footage – this had a few extra objectives for harder difficulties, just like GoldenEye.
The cutscenes in this have voice overs (but not the actors from the films) and are recreated in the game engine, with the story being rewritten so that the game itself makes sense without having to have seen the film. I much prefer this way of doing things, as it helps keep the game’s identity throughout the whole thing.
Back at MI6 headquarters, not only does a bomb go off, but it gets invaded by goons, you have to fight them off, as well as putting out fires, protecting staff and enabling the security systems. It’s a really fun level, and is a great example of how the game expands upon scenes of the film.
After the boat chase (which you don’t get to play), you chase the assassin through docks along the Themes, a straightforward level that introduces the grapple function of the watch, which can be used in certain spaces to climb upwards, adding some verticality to some levels.
Taking advantage of the London setting, the assassin then proceeds into the Underground, having her goons take hostages and setting up a Bomb to try to slow Bond down. The trains are a bit crazy as you have to dodge them, but it’s very enjoyable, and you have to reach the assassin’s hot air balloon before she escapes.
The levels in The World Is Not Enough to a good job of feeling alive and like real locations. I would have liked a few that are less linear, but they’re still enjoyable.
Next up is a skiing mission, which is done in quite a simple way, feeling a bit like a light gun shooter. You can move left/right a bit and can speed up and slow down. There are a few targets that you need to hit, which can be a bit difficult and require restating the mission, which can be a bit annoying.
Next up is the main stealth mission – in most other missions, stealth is optional, but works quite well. Your watch has a “stun” function which, really, is utterly useless – it just makes enemies wiggle and it stops right after you stop firing it at them. Luckily, your watch has a dart which does knock enemies out – or you can punch them to sleep.
Here, you sneak around the grounds of Elektra’s house (and a little bit inside), tapping phones and taking photos of evidence. There are are few villains you need to avoid completely. I remember as a kid taking ages on this level, but once you have the guard patterns down, it isn’t too difficult.
The following two levels are probably the weakest, but still not bad. One has you chasing after a henchman to replace him, you can be stealthy or as loud as you want (just be prepared for a lot of enemies). Then you try to stop Renard from stealing a bomb, meeting up with Christmas Jones and escaping from an explosion.
The “cities of walkways” mission is split into two levels. The first is a fairly typical level as you fight some enemies to reach a computer containing evidence, while the second has you dodging helicopters with buzzsaws and is a great level, as you jump around on platforms that are being sliced then grab a fancy rocket launcher and guide missiles into an attacking chopper.
A few more decent levels follow as you chase a traitor though Istanbul, then you get captured and have to rescue M and kill Elektra, then it’s on to infiltrating Renard’s submarine. You start off on the docks and have to kill the guards efficiently enough to avoid them setting off the alarm. Then you climb into the submarine – with no loading screen, which I thought was impressive when the game came out in order to rescue Dr. Jones and disable the submarine controls.
The final level has a lot of swimming as you navigate the damaged submarine. The controls take some time to get used to, but it’s not so bad once you do – although as you had limited time in this mission, I think the game could have done with some swimming in an earlier mission.
You need to navigate through the submarine, kill Renard (which is similar to the film, they don’t force a boss encounter) and then escape, finishing the game.
The N64 version also has a multiplayer mode which is a lot of fun, complete with bots (although, strangely, you can’t play against bots on your own without cheats). Beating the main game on higher difficulties will unlock more characters to play as.
While it doesn’t reach the heights of GoldenEye, The World Is Not Enough is an extremely solid game and is a ton of fun.
After GoldenEye and the Game Boy games, the Bond license moved from Nintendo to Electronic Arts, with their first game based on the film Tomorrow Never Dies and developed by Black Ops Entertainment.
While with GoldenEye, I recreated something close to the original experience, I want to give the other games the best chance possible, so I played games in emulators with improved resolution, widescreen and adjusting the controls to be more comfortable.
Tomorrow Never Dies is a third person shooter with a focus on auto aim (although the auto aim is deliberately inaccurate). You can manually aim, but it’s very slow. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t take advantage of the DualShock controller, instead oping to focus entirely on the original controller. While it’s understandable they didn’t want to prevent anyone from playing, it’s a shame that they didn’t support additional options. The original control scheme uses X to shoot and the shoulder buttons to strafe, but I managed to make a more comfortable control scheme more like a standard third person shooter, just without the ability to look up and down.
The first level has you fight through a snow base and target a communications tower by targeting it with a special camera (the best gadget use in the game), then escape by skiing down the mountain. The skiing is awkward but not terrible, although both Bond’s and the enemies attacks of flailing their arms looks absolutely pitiful.
The health bar was an issue for me, I’m colourblind and could not make out any visual differences as I took damage. The life system is also a bit strange: you have limited lives and when you die, you just flash and carry on from exactly where you were. Each mission has one extra life hidden in it.
After this first mission, you have a mission where you take pictures of some machinery and steal a jet (which I got in an it span around oddly until the mission ended). The missions in this game are fairly short and there are only 10 in the game. After the end of this mission, it cuts to a clip of the film, followed by the full opening credits, featuring the song from the film. I always found that the movie clips makes the game feel more disjointed, especially as everyone’s voices sounds different due to different voice actors.
The next two missions are also fairly simple: obtaining information form Carver’s Media building and newspaper press. Gadgets are pretty much keycards, and you just shoot your way through the levels, even though the mission briefing implies stealth, other than manually aiming and shooting before the enemy is fully rendered, there is none.
The next level is about rescuing and protecting Carver’s wife, here you are introduced to the game’s boss fights (they all work like this). You have to dodge their main attacks while either using an immense amount of ammo, or risk manually aiming for a headshot to take off a decent amount. It’s not an enjoyable way to do boss fights at all, and they’re all the same except for different projectiles.
Next up is the game’s best mission: a car chase where you have to blow up an enemy convoy. It’s very basic, and like many other missions, is incredibly short, but it manages to not be frustrating and the handling is passable enough to have a bit of fun.
This is followed immediately by another skiing mission that ends in a boss fight, before you infiltrate Carver’s headquarters, get captured and escape with Wai Lin – who has not been seen or mentioned at all in this game until she randomly appears when Bond gets captured. Without knowing the plot of the film quite well, you would be lost playing the game.
While she randomly turned up at the end of the previous mission without being seen or mentioned previously, you now get to play as Wei Lin for a mission. M explains that she can’t send Bond as the guards have been ordered to shoot him on sight, so while playing as Wei, you turn around a corner and immediately get shot at by guards, so having Bond sent would have made no difference.
She gets to fight a boss to get a rocket launcher and then use that to fight a helicopter, before having to decode information (done via a simple Mastermind-style minigame). This is the most action-spy level of the game, and Bond isn’t even part of it.
Now you’re onto the final level, which has a confusing layout and lots of corridors that look exactly the same. You have to stop Carver from launching a nuke, and he is as strong as all the other bosses in the game. After you defeat him, you have to quickly cancel the nuclear launch then escape the boat.
If you’re not playing on the hardest difficulty you’ll then get a message: finish on 00 Agent mode to get unlock the final cutscene. This is the only unlockable of the game, and if you trudge through the hardest difficulty, you’ll unlock this final cutscene: a two second long clip from the film of the boat exploding, followed by random clips of previous missions. It’s such a hilariously bad reward.
There’s no fun unlockables, no difference other than enemy health and damage between difficulties and no multiplayer. It’s a very short, bare bones games and isn’t even a fun one.
While with GoldenEye, I recreated something close to the original experience, I want to give the other games the best chance possible, so I played games in emulators with improved resolution, widescreen and adjusting the controls to be more comfortable.
Tomorrow Never Dies is a third person shooter with a focus on auto aim (although the auto aim is deliberately inaccurate). You can manually aim, but it’s very slow. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t take advantage of the DualShock controller, instead oping to focus entirely on the original controller. While it’s understandable they didn’t want to prevent anyone from playing, it’s a shame that they didn’t support additional options. The original control scheme uses X to shoot and the shoulder buttons to strafe, but I managed to make a more comfortable control scheme more like a standard third person shooter, just without the ability to look up and down.
The first level has you fight through a snow base and target a communications tower by targeting it with a special camera (the best gadget use in the game), then escape by skiing down the mountain. The skiing is awkward but not terrible, although both Bond’s and the enemies attacks of flailing their arms looks absolutely pitiful.
The health bar was an issue for me, I’m colourblind and could not make out any visual differences as I took damage. The life system is also a bit strange: you have limited lives and when you die, you just flash and carry on from exactly where you were. Each mission has one extra life hidden in it.
After this first mission, you have a mission where you take pictures of some machinery and steal a jet (which I got in an it span around oddly until the mission ended). The missions in this game are fairly short and there are only 10 in the game. After the end of this mission, it cuts to a clip of the film, followed by the full opening credits, featuring the song from the film. I always found that the movie clips makes the game feel more disjointed, especially as everyone’s voices sounds different due to different voice actors.
The next two missions are also fairly simple: obtaining information form Carver’s Media building and newspaper press. Gadgets are pretty much keycards, and you just shoot your way through the levels, even though the mission briefing implies stealth, other than manually aiming and shooting before the enemy is fully rendered, there is none.
The next level is about rescuing and protecting Carver’s wife, here you are introduced to the game’s boss fights (they all work like this). You have to dodge their main attacks while either using an immense amount of ammo, or risk manually aiming for a headshot to take off a decent amount. It’s not an enjoyable way to do boss fights at all, and they’re all the same except for different projectiles.
Next up is the game’s best mission: a car chase where you have to blow up an enemy convoy. It’s very basic, and like many other missions, is incredibly short, but it manages to not be frustrating and the handling is passable enough to have a bit of fun.
This is followed immediately by another skiing mission that ends in a boss fight, before you infiltrate Carver’s headquarters, get captured and escape with Wai Lin – who has not been seen or mentioned at all in this game until she randomly appears when Bond gets captured. Without knowing the plot of the film quite well, you would be lost playing the game.
While she randomly turned up at the end of the previous mission without being seen or mentioned previously, you now get to play as Wei Lin for a mission. M explains that she can’t send Bond as the guards have been ordered to shoot him on sight, so while playing as Wei, you turn around a corner and immediately get shot at by guards, so having Bond sent would have made no difference.
She gets to fight a boss to get a rocket launcher and then use that to fight a helicopter, before having to decode information (done via a simple Mastermind-style minigame). This is the most action-spy level of the game, and Bond isn’t even part of it.
Now you’re onto the final level, which has a confusing layout and lots of corridors that look exactly the same. You have to stop Carver from launching a nuke, and he is as strong as all the other bosses in the game. After you defeat him, you have to quickly cancel the nuclear launch then escape the boat.
If you’re not playing on the hardest difficulty you’ll then get a message: finish on 00 Agent mode to get unlock the final cutscene. This is the only unlockable of the game, and if you trudge through the hardest difficulty, you’ll unlock this final cutscene: a two second long clip from the film of the boat exploding, followed by random clips of previous missions. It’s such a hilariously bad reward.
There’s no fun unlockables, no difference other than enemy health and damage between difficulties and no multiplayer. It’s a very short, bare bones games and isn’t even a fun one.
1998
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.
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.
1997
The legendary game GoldenEye. This is the game I got with my N64 and I spent all day searching around the dam level for bungee rope as it wasn’t in my inventory. It was a landmark game for not just first person shooters, but video games in general.
GoldenEye had the brilliant idea of adding objectives that were more than just pushing buttons then going through the level again to look for something that has changed. You had to protect certain people, blow up certain objects and find objects. On higher difficult options, you have more objectives to complete.
The praise of GoldenEye has been done countless times before, but one aspect I think is overlooked is the level design, in terms of how the levels feel like actual places and buildings and not a nonsensical string of rooms and corridors.
Part of this is due to how the developers made the game: the GoldenEye team had never made a video game and was a risky experiment from Rare to throw people who had never worked in the video game industry to see if they would come up with unique methods. It’s quite shocking that they were willing to do this with an IP like James Bond, but it paid off.
Typically, the objective and player path is made first and then the level is built around that, but for GoldenEye, the levels were constructed and then they added the objectives and decided where the player would start. This meant that some rooms are essentially “pointless”, but it helps makes everything feel real.
The muiltiplayer was another huge surprise – a few of the developers started it with 6 weeks of development left and without getting permission to do so first. It was simple, but at the same time extremely enjoyable and is still one of the most famous multiplayer modes in a video game.
Some aspects of GoldenEye haven’t aged well, particularly the controls (although there are dual analogue options hidden in the settings, requiring two controllers), but sort that out and it’s still an absolute joy to play.
GoldenEye had the brilliant idea of adding objectives that were more than just pushing buttons then going through the level again to look for something that has changed. You had to protect certain people, blow up certain objects and find objects. On higher difficult options, you have more objectives to complete.
The praise of GoldenEye has been done countless times before, but one aspect I think is overlooked is the level design, in terms of how the levels feel like actual places and buildings and not a nonsensical string of rooms and corridors.
Part of this is due to how the developers made the game: the GoldenEye team had never made a video game and was a risky experiment from Rare to throw people who had never worked in the video game industry to see if they would come up with unique methods. It’s quite shocking that they were willing to do this with an IP like James Bond, but it paid off.
Typically, the objective and player path is made first and then the level is built around that, but for GoldenEye, the levels were constructed and then they added the objectives and decided where the player would start. This meant that some rooms are essentially “pointless”, but it helps makes everything feel real.
The muiltiplayer was another huge surprise – a few of the developers started it with 6 weeks of development left and without getting permission to do so first. It was simple, but at the same time extremely enjoyable and is still one of the most famous multiplayer modes in a video game.
Some aspects of GoldenEye haven’t aged well, particularly the controls (although there are dual analogue options hidden in the settings, requiring two controllers), but sort that out and it’s still an absolute joy to play.
The 8-bit version of The Duel has the same level themes as the Mega Drive version, however, the level layout and structure of the game is completely different. Also gone is the requirement of saving hostages as well as setting off bombs in the levels.
As you’re not travelling backwards and forwards throughout the levels, each level now has three stages to work though. The there are hidden paths that lead to Q crates and hostages that improve your score, and it’s fun to explore the little areas.
There are a few oddities with enemies in the boat and jungle stages. The first level has deadly fish that leap out of the water and are a pain to hit, but you can just hang back and fire until you get them (you have unlimited ammo). The jungle level features snakes, which seems logical, but they fire projectiles at you. Most other enemies are goons which have no idea what to do if you crouch, making it east to dispose of them, with robotic turrets and the like in later missions.
The levels are quite fun, and Bond’s jumping feels smoother in this version. From a gameplay and level perspective, I enjoyed this much more than the Mega Drive version of the game. The graphics are obviously not as good, but are really great for the Master System. The sound really lets the game down – you have the option of choosing sound effects OR music. I made the mistake of going with the music. It’s fine for the first minute, but then the same beepy repetitive tune if all you hear for the entire game, I ended up muting it.
After you defeat the third hanger level, you have one more level: as there are no bosses you get a timed final level. The time you get depends on the amount of hostages you save and Q cases you find. I had to (though a bit of trial an error) fund the perfect route to beat the game.
Despite the sound issues, this is a fun little game and and it’s surprising that it’s a better game than the main version.
As you’re not travelling backwards and forwards throughout the levels, each level now has three stages to work though. The there are hidden paths that lead to Q crates and hostages that improve your score, and it’s fun to explore the little areas.
There are a few oddities with enemies in the boat and jungle stages. The first level has deadly fish that leap out of the water and are a pain to hit, but you can just hang back and fire until you get them (you have unlimited ammo). The jungle level features snakes, which seems logical, but they fire projectiles at you. Most other enemies are goons which have no idea what to do if you crouch, making it east to dispose of them, with robotic turrets and the like in later missions.
The levels are quite fun, and Bond’s jumping feels smoother in this version. From a gameplay and level perspective, I enjoyed this much more than the Mega Drive version of the game. The graphics are obviously not as good, but are really great for the Master System. The sound really lets the game down – you have the option of choosing sound effects OR music. I made the mistake of going with the music. It’s fine for the first minute, but then the same beepy repetitive tune if all you hear for the entire game, I ended up muting it.
After you defeat the third hanger level, you have one more level: as there are no bosses you get a timed final level. The time you get depends on the amount of hostages you save and Q cases you find. I had to (though a bit of trial an error) fund the perfect route to beat the game.
Despite the sound issues, this is a fun little game and and it’s surprising that it’s a better game than the main version.
Developed by an internal Domark development team The Kremlin, The Duel is Domark’s not just final James Bond game, but also their first one not based on a specific Bond film. Instead, this is a new adventure starring Timothy Dalton’s Bond (although I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s never heard of this game, the box just uses a photo from a Licence to Kill poster).
That said, the “story” is just a bit of blurb in the manual: Professor Gravemar is planning on launching a satellite from his secret island base, which will let him take over the world. Expecting James Bond to try and stop him, he fills the island with his goons and creates a cloning device to bring some of his villains back to life. He also spreads hostages across the island to distract Bond. The hostages are all the same women, so perhaps the hostages are also clones – such a concept is far too much of the simplicity of this game’s plot, which is completely absent from the game itself.
Starting off on a boat, The Duel looks very nice, making good use of the Mega Drive’s capabilities, with detailed sprites that are zoomed out enough to not hamper gameplay. The music is also great (including a great rendition of the Bond theme), having a distinct Mega Drive feel but also fitting James Bond. You go you through levels, running, jumping and shooting. I did think the jumping felt a bit stiff and overall the game has a bit of a janky feel to it.
It’s not as simple as getting to the end, though, you need to hunt for the hostages. These are hidden extremely well and most of your time will be tediously backtracking back and forth searching for them. The game loves to make use of covering entrances with foreground objects, and also hides enemies in the same way. Once you find the hostages, you can set off a bomb (which is hidden somewhere near the end of the level) then rush to the exit.
After the initial boat level, you have to explore a jungle and do the same thing. Due to platforms on different levels, you’ll find yourself missing enemies more. Your ammo is limited. While enemies drop more, that’s the only way to get more ammo. If you run out, there’s nothing you can do, as Bond has no melee attacks in this game, which is strange, especially for a game with limited ammo. You can shoot diagonally, but you need to shoot and hold down fire to change the angle of the shot.
Next up is the secret volcano base. There are lots of needlessly large pits and lifts and you’ll spend quite a bit of time waiting for platforms, sometimes having to wait for them a second time as you have to time them with the movement of fireballs. More hostages to find and a bomb to set off.
Next up is navigating the hanger bay for the professor’s oddly shaped shuttle, which features lots of empty areas with nothing going on. The end of this level has a short boss you need to get rid off before activating the bomb and escaping.
After this, you reach level five: which is a boss fight against Jaws in a strange machine. Once you beat him, you’re done.
This is an incredibly short game padded out by hiding some of the paths to the hostages, making you walk and down each level – which aren’t particularly colossal either. The gameplay is fine, but feels a bit clunky. The graphics and music are the only particularly good parts of the game.
That said, the “story” is just a bit of blurb in the manual: Professor Gravemar is planning on launching a satellite from his secret island base, which will let him take over the world. Expecting James Bond to try and stop him, he fills the island with his goons and creates a cloning device to bring some of his villains back to life. He also spreads hostages across the island to distract Bond. The hostages are all the same women, so perhaps the hostages are also clones – such a concept is far too much of the simplicity of this game’s plot, which is completely absent from the game itself.
Starting off on a boat, The Duel looks very nice, making good use of the Mega Drive’s capabilities, with detailed sprites that are zoomed out enough to not hamper gameplay. The music is also great (including a great rendition of the Bond theme), having a distinct Mega Drive feel but also fitting James Bond. You go you through levels, running, jumping and shooting. I did think the jumping felt a bit stiff and overall the game has a bit of a janky feel to it.
It’s not as simple as getting to the end, though, you need to hunt for the hostages. These are hidden extremely well and most of your time will be tediously backtracking back and forth searching for them. The game loves to make use of covering entrances with foreground objects, and also hides enemies in the same way. Once you find the hostages, you can set off a bomb (which is hidden somewhere near the end of the level) then rush to the exit.
After the initial boat level, you have to explore a jungle and do the same thing. Due to platforms on different levels, you’ll find yourself missing enemies more. Your ammo is limited. While enemies drop more, that’s the only way to get more ammo. If you run out, there’s nothing you can do, as Bond has no melee attacks in this game, which is strange, especially for a game with limited ammo. You can shoot diagonally, but you need to shoot and hold down fire to change the angle of the shot.
Next up is the secret volcano base. There are lots of needlessly large pits and lifts and you’ll spend quite a bit of time waiting for platforms, sometimes having to wait for them a second time as you have to time them with the movement of fireballs. More hostages to find and a bomb to set off.
Next up is navigating the hanger bay for the professor’s oddly shaped shuttle, which features lots of empty areas with nothing going on. The end of this level has a short boss you need to get rid off before activating the bomb and escaping.
After this, you reach level five: which is a boss fight against Jaws in a strange machine. Once you beat him, you’re done.
This is an incredibly short game padded out by hiding some of the paths to the hostages, making you walk and down each level – which aren’t particularly colossal either. The gameplay is fine, but feels a bit clunky. The graphics and music are the only particularly good parts of the game.
1992
Another game based on the James Bond Jr. cartoon, this one developed by Grey Matter. While sometimes different games of the same name shares some elements, such as level themes or rough story, this one is completely different to the James Bond Jr. NES game. The SNES version is a mixture of a platformer and a scrolling shooter.
One interesting thing is this didn’t even start out as a James Bond Jr. game, it was originally a SNES remake of Grey Matter’s NES Captain Planet and the Planeteers game, but due to company changes an license issues, they ended up re-tooling the work they had done into a new licensed game.
You start off in a temple level, hunting for the villain Dr. Derange, you barely have time to figure out the controls before you reach the first vehicle segment – and I’m not exaggerating about the time, it really is less than 20 seconds.
You might expect a short but simple minigame, but it’s surprisingly long. If you played it perfectly, it will take 5 minutes, which doesn’t sound long, but you will die. A lot. There’s a ton of projectiles flying around and one hit kills you. You can get a shield that will protect you from a few hits, however that doesn’t protect you from the environment, with some very narrow sections to navigate, slightly bumping any pixel will kill you.
Your helicopter moves extremely fast, and the sprites are so large that you don’t have any time to react to anything. Instead, this section is a long trial and error as you get a bit further each time, having to memorise the entire route to react before things appear on screen. You have two weapons: a shot that fires completely forward.
Back to the main gameplay, you now have three acts of a temple level, punching natives and SCUM soldiers. Exploring the level you can find dart guns and explosive drinks cans to use as grenades. along with other powerup, such as springy shoes to jump higher.
The gameplay itself is pretty solid, and the graphical style is quite nice. There are hidden areas to explore but the route to the end is fairly simple. One problem is, once again, the size of the sprites. James Bond Jr is kept firmly in the middle of the screen throughout the levels, which means the gaps for jumps reach the edge of the screen, often with enemies hanging on the edge, not visible until you’re mid-jump, yet also so close to the edge that if you don’t use your dart gun before jumping, you’ll take damage.
Once you defeat the boss, it’s onto the next stage. All three stages follow the same structure: a vehicle section followed by three short platforming levels. This one is a speedboat section as you head to Venice, and this part is a lot of fun, dodging gondolas, shooting enemies and making jumps, collecting a power up that makes you jump even further. At this point I was thinking that, after the rough start, fun vehicles with some decent platforming would make the rest of this an alright game.
And then you get the inevitable sewer level, notorious for always being terrible levels. This one is no exception, with confusing layouts, really annoying bats and lots of awkward jumps to make. While the developers avoided the same problem with getting stuck in levels as the NES game by having the shoe power-ups be permanent, they end up making the same mistake here. In this level are ice power ups, these are limited in number.
These are used to freeze pools of toxic waste, allowing you to cross over. Use too many against enemies (or use them on the wrong pools) and you’ll have to restart. There’s also some really annoying door traps. They’re just a grey line and if you walk over them, they repeatedly slam James Bond Jr, draining his health.
Get through there and you reach the next area, this vehicle section is a plane which functions exactly the same as the helicopter in the first stage. It’s not quite as frustrating as the first one, so at least it’s over quicker. You’re then on the final level.
Which, naturally, is a slippery ice level, because everyone loves those. Thankfully, part way though you get some rocket boots, letting you fly around the level, along with being able to find a ring that fires lasers that help immensely with the final boss.
James Bond Jr. is an average platformer, but hampered by visibility and a few awful vehicle levels. It looks quite nice, with some good animation throughout, but for the most part is a fairly forgetful game.
One interesting thing is this didn’t even start out as a James Bond Jr. game, it was originally a SNES remake of Grey Matter’s NES Captain Planet and the Planeteers game, but due to company changes an license issues, they ended up re-tooling the work they had done into a new licensed game.
You start off in a temple level, hunting for the villain Dr. Derange, you barely have time to figure out the controls before you reach the first vehicle segment – and I’m not exaggerating about the time, it really is less than 20 seconds.
You might expect a short but simple minigame, but it’s surprisingly long. If you played it perfectly, it will take 5 minutes, which doesn’t sound long, but you will die. A lot. There’s a ton of projectiles flying around and one hit kills you. You can get a shield that will protect you from a few hits, however that doesn’t protect you from the environment, with some very narrow sections to navigate, slightly bumping any pixel will kill you.
Your helicopter moves extremely fast, and the sprites are so large that you don’t have any time to react to anything. Instead, this section is a long trial and error as you get a bit further each time, having to memorise the entire route to react before things appear on screen. You have two weapons: a shot that fires completely forward.
Back to the main gameplay, you now have three acts of a temple level, punching natives and SCUM soldiers. Exploring the level you can find dart guns and explosive drinks cans to use as grenades. along with other powerup, such as springy shoes to jump higher.
The gameplay itself is pretty solid, and the graphical style is quite nice. There are hidden areas to explore but the route to the end is fairly simple. One problem is, once again, the size of the sprites. James Bond Jr is kept firmly in the middle of the screen throughout the levels, which means the gaps for jumps reach the edge of the screen, often with enemies hanging on the edge, not visible until you’re mid-jump, yet also so close to the edge that if you don’t use your dart gun before jumping, you’ll take damage.
Once you defeat the boss, it’s onto the next stage. All three stages follow the same structure: a vehicle section followed by three short platforming levels. This one is a speedboat section as you head to Venice, and this part is a lot of fun, dodging gondolas, shooting enemies and making jumps, collecting a power up that makes you jump even further. At this point I was thinking that, after the rough start, fun vehicles with some decent platforming would make the rest of this an alright game.
And then you get the inevitable sewer level, notorious for always being terrible levels. This one is no exception, with confusing layouts, really annoying bats and lots of awkward jumps to make. While the developers avoided the same problem with getting stuck in levels as the NES game by having the shoe power-ups be permanent, they end up making the same mistake here. In this level are ice power ups, these are limited in number.
These are used to freeze pools of toxic waste, allowing you to cross over. Use too many against enemies (or use them on the wrong pools) and you’ll have to restart. There’s also some really annoying door traps. They’re just a grey line and if you walk over them, they repeatedly slam James Bond Jr, draining his health.
Get through there and you reach the next area, this vehicle section is a plane which functions exactly the same as the helicopter in the first stage. It’s not quite as frustrating as the first one, so at least it’s over quicker. You’re then on the final level.
Which, naturally, is a slippery ice level, because everyone loves those. Thankfully, part way though you get some rocket boots, letting you fly around the level, along with being able to find a ring that fires lasers that help immensely with the final boss.
James Bond Jr. is an average platformer, but hampered by visibility and a few awful vehicle levels. It looks quite nice, with some good animation throughout, but for the most part is a fairly forgetful game.
1992
Based on the cartoon show about James Bond’s Nephew, this is the second ever game developed by Eurocom, who have made a bunch of Bond games over the years. The NES version of James Bond Jr. is completely different to the SNES version.
With licensed platformers on the NES, you can create a list of annoying things that will frustrate anyone: bullet sponges enemies, maze-like levels with no maps, having to backtrack, enemy attacks knocking you back, annoying springs, having to playtform between screen loads, enemies that trap you in endless damage loops and getting softlocked due to limited ammo. James Bond Jr on the NES manages to tick all of those boxes.
The game consists of four levels, each involving you tracking down objectives and then finding the level exit. The first level has you exploring sewers to disarm missiles. At the start, you drop down a large hole and come across your first enemy: a giant shooting multiple rounds that requires 30-40 hits to kill. Your pistol uses up ammo very quickly, although it will slowly recharge up to 30 rounds (collecting ammo packs will fill it to 99).
When you find a missile, you have to complete a sliding puzzle piece challenge to get colours into the right order. Near the start of the level, there’s something that looks like electric that hurts you if you land on in – this is actually water that you can swim though if you get a scuba mask.
The second level has you searching for safes. In the section in the image, I got trapped in the corner by these annoying dogs that are difficult to hit. Once you find a safe, you have to work out the combination in the worst codebreaking minigame I’ve encountered. This isn’t mastermind-style. You put numbers in four slots and see if any are right. You have nine attempts, so if any of them are the final number you have to try, you have to start again (and the combination resets). On top of this, some of the safes are traps that blow up in your face.
The third level thankfully ditches minigames and you just have to blow up strange “reactor” objects in rooms. You can find a jetpack in this level which runs out of “ammo” very quickly – and there are some sections you can’t navigate without it, meaning you have to restart. There are lots of moving platforms and annoying jumps – I forgot to mention that jumping feels very unresponsive.
After James Bond Jr. defeats the secret base, he escapes by helicopter but is than shot down, conveniently landing right next to SCUM’s secret base. Here you have to rescue scientists by killing the monsters guarding them. You can find a potion which will turn James Bond Jr. into a monster, letting him jump higher – use it up in the wrong place and you’re stuck.
The NES version of James Bond Jr. is very typical of licenced platformers on the NES. Everything seems to be made to frustrate the player, and enemies take so many hits that even defeating them isn’t fun.
With licensed platformers on the NES, you can create a list of annoying things that will frustrate anyone: bullet sponges enemies, maze-like levels with no maps, having to backtrack, enemy attacks knocking you back, annoying springs, having to playtform between screen loads, enemies that trap you in endless damage loops and getting softlocked due to limited ammo. James Bond Jr on the NES manages to tick all of those boxes.
The game consists of four levels, each involving you tracking down objectives and then finding the level exit. The first level has you exploring sewers to disarm missiles. At the start, you drop down a large hole and come across your first enemy: a giant shooting multiple rounds that requires 30-40 hits to kill. Your pistol uses up ammo very quickly, although it will slowly recharge up to 30 rounds (collecting ammo packs will fill it to 99).
When you find a missile, you have to complete a sliding puzzle piece challenge to get colours into the right order. Near the start of the level, there’s something that looks like electric that hurts you if you land on in – this is actually water that you can swim though if you get a scuba mask.
The second level has you searching for safes. In the section in the image, I got trapped in the corner by these annoying dogs that are difficult to hit. Once you find a safe, you have to work out the combination in the worst codebreaking minigame I’ve encountered. This isn’t mastermind-style. You put numbers in four slots and see if any are right. You have nine attempts, so if any of them are the final number you have to try, you have to start again (and the combination resets). On top of this, some of the safes are traps that blow up in your face.
The third level thankfully ditches minigames and you just have to blow up strange “reactor” objects in rooms. You can find a jetpack in this level which runs out of “ammo” very quickly – and there are some sections you can’t navigate without it, meaning you have to restart. There are lots of moving platforms and annoying jumps – I forgot to mention that jumping feels very unresponsive.
After James Bond Jr. defeats the secret base, he escapes by helicopter but is than shot down, conveniently landing right next to SCUM’s secret base. Here you have to rescue scientists by killing the monsters guarding them. You can find a potion which will turn James Bond Jr. into a monster, letting him jump higher – use it up in the wrong place and you’re stuck.
The NES version of James Bond Jr. is very typical of licenced platformers on the NES. Everything seems to be made to frustrate the player, and enemies take so many hits that even defeating them isn’t fun.
This game first came out in the UK, where is was not a James Bond game. Here it was “Operation Stealth”, a point and click adventure starring a 007 rip-off John Glames. When Interplay released the game in the US, they applied for a James Bond license, renaming the main character and adding a bit of text explaining that Bond is “on loan” to the CIA.
This is a point and click adventure – but what I call the “bad kind”. A good point and click adventure, to me, is one where no matter where you are in the game, you have access to the required locations that have what you need to proceed. A bad one has objects you can miss and be stuck much later (after having saved your game), and the worst will make needed objects simply difficult to see.
The Stealth Affair sets its tone fairly early on. You arrive with an airport with a briefcase and a passport, and a guard asks for your passport. If you show your passport…game over. Visitors from America make for great hostages and you get captured. You need to find out what country is liked and then create a fake passport.
There’s a newspaper stand in the area, you have no coins but luckily if you examine the coin return you’ll find one. Then you can buy a paper and reveal the country (it’s randomised from a small selection). You then have to use your briefcase and “operate” the briefcase to open it, use a calculator to get to a hidden compartment and then create your passport.
The next section is mostly about getting coins to buy a flower as a sign for your rendezvous. You go to a bank, swap coins, get the flower sit down, follow instructions and you’ll eventually get captured. This section is really just a lot of back and forth as the puzzles change from obscure to not really having any puzzles at all.
You end up getting captured by the villain’s henchmen who, in typical Bond fashion, tie you up and trap you into a cave, blowing the entrance, instead of just shooting him. One thing to note is that Bond never has access to a gun in this game, although he does punch two people throughout it. This cave section highlights another one of the game’s problems: the “USE” and “OPERATE” commands. In the cave you find a pickaxe and breeze coming through the wall, but if you use the pickaxe on the wall, it does nothing. You need to stand in the perfect spot and “OPERATE” the pickaxe a few times.
This leads to the first action sequence: here you dive through water with limited air. The controls are atrocious, and Bond sticks to rocks extremely easily. Action scenes in adventure games are a nice idea, but they really need to be enjoyable.
After this you need to investigate a hotel room, although make sure you go out of your way and talk to a crazy person on the beach selling the next big thing. You’ll need that later on. Investigating the hotel, where you’ll end up getting captured again.
This is where the game sneaks in the first time you have to do an action in the middle of a cutscene. All the shortcut buttons for the different actions skip dialogue, so you have to use the right click menu, but during most of the cutscene, right click does nothing. You have to right click at the right point and operate the object you used earlier.
You then get thrown into the sea and have to escape, this is a moment where you have to perform the actions immediately or you’ll die – there’s no room to think or misclick on anything.
Bond then infiltrates the enemy base as part of a magic show, then sneaks off in a disappearing act. Time for another action sequence.
We have a top down maze. Guards move around, but can’t go through the revolving doors, which Bond can move. They are incredibly tedious and the guard’s patterns are random. You need to find a key and then the exit. After completing this, you have to do another. Operation Stealth had four mazes in total, but two were removed for the Bond version, although one is too many.
Then you get to investigate the boss’s office, one of the best parts of the game. Here you have everything you need to investigate, you need to find a hidden safe and use your codebreaker to help you find the code. You feel like a spy in this moment. You then get ambushed and have to play a dreadful jetski minigame until M and Q pop up in a submarine to tell you that the villain, Dr. Why, has threatened to nuke multiple cities if the government don’t give them more plutonium than they have access to.
Bond swims to Why’s secret underwater base and gets captured again, he manages to break free and gets a disguise (before going through some more terrible mazes, this time filled with giant killer rats and you can only see a small area around Bond). Before entering the final room, you’ll need to create a distraction then enter the final room, with the final confrontation with Dr. Why where you have to perform the right actions at the perfect time. The day is saved, buy Dr. Why has escaped, taking the captured Bond girl with him.
In this final confrontation, you only have to do two things. But unless you’re reading a guide, you’ll likely never be able to figure it out.
One of the items is an inflatable raft. In the final secret base, there’s what looks like just a panel for a machine, but when you hover over it, it says its a garbage disposal, the raft is hidden there. While this is annoying and difficult to spot, it’s at least something you might encounter and split off. The other item you need is impossibly obscure. It can be found during the swimming section before the final base.
If you swim the wrong direction, you’ll come across a screen with a few pieces of seaweed. You can play the game without ever seeing this screen, and you have no reason to fully explore before going on. You may examine one bit of seaweed and it will just state that it’s seaweed. If you examine the correct one, it will mention something stuck in it. However, even then the object you need doesn’t have anything when you hover over it, so you need to keep clicking around that spot for the right pixel to activate picking up the most vital object in the game: an elastic band.
Once you finish, Bond has a big reward ceremony where the leader of the country declares a national holiday in celebration of the super secret spy.
The Stealth Affair has some nice moments, but frustrating gameplay. The dialogue is great in some parts, but other parts haven’t been altered from when the game was parodying Bond. The graphics and sound are very nice, along with the animation, so the presentation is pretty good all round.
This is a point and click adventure – but what I call the “bad kind”. A good point and click adventure, to me, is one where no matter where you are in the game, you have access to the required locations that have what you need to proceed. A bad one has objects you can miss and be stuck much later (after having saved your game), and the worst will make needed objects simply difficult to see.
The Stealth Affair sets its tone fairly early on. You arrive with an airport with a briefcase and a passport, and a guard asks for your passport. If you show your passport…game over. Visitors from America make for great hostages and you get captured. You need to find out what country is liked and then create a fake passport.
There’s a newspaper stand in the area, you have no coins but luckily if you examine the coin return you’ll find one. Then you can buy a paper and reveal the country (it’s randomised from a small selection). You then have to use your briefcase and “operate” the briefcase to open it, use a calculator to get to a hidden compartment and then create your passport.
The next section is mostly about getting coins to buy a flower as a sign for your rendezvous. You go to a bank, swap coins, get the flower sit down, follow instructions and you’ll eventually get captured. This section is really just a lot of back and forth as the puzzles change from obscure to not really having any puzzles at all.
You end up getting captured by the villain’s henchmen who, in typical Bond fashion, tie you up and trap you into a cave, blowing the entrance, instead of just shooting him. One thing to note is that Bond never has access to a gun in this game, although he does punch two people throughout it. This cave section highlights another one of the game’s problems: the “USE” and “OPERATE” commands. In the cave you find a pickaxe and breeze coming through the wall, but if you use the pickaxe on the wall, it does nothing. You need to stand in the perfect spot and “OPERATE” the pickaxe a few times.
This leads to the first action sequence: here you dive through water with limited air. The controls are atrocious, and Bond sticks to rocks extremely easily. Action scenes in adventure games are a nice idea, but they really need to be enjoyable.
After this you need to investigate a hotel room, although make sure you go out of your way and talk to a crazy person on the beach selling the next big thing. You’ll need that later on. Investigating the hotel, where you’ll end up getting captured again.
This is where the game sneaks in the first time you have to do an action in the middle of a cutscene. All the shortcut buttons for the different actions skip dialogue, so you have to use the right click menu, but during most of the cutscene, right click does nothing. You have to right click at the right point and operate the object you used earlier.
You then get thrown into the sea and have to escape, this is a moment where you have to perform the actions immediately or you’ll die – there’s no room to think or misclick on anything.
Bond then infiltrates the enemy base as part of a magic show, then sneaks off in a disappearing act. Time for another action sequence.
We have a top down maze. Guards move around, but can’t go through the revolving doors, which Bond can move. They are incredibly tedious and the guard’s patterns are random. You need to find a key and then the exit. After completing this, you have to do another. Operation Stealth had four mazes in total, but two were removed for the Bond version, although one is too many.
Then you get to investigate the boss’s office, one of the best parts of the game. Here you have everything you need to investigate, you need to find a hidden safe and use your codebreaker to help you find the code. You feel like a spy in this moment. You then get ambushed and have to play a dreadful jetski minigame until M and Q pop up in a submarine to tell you that the villain, Dr. Why, has threatened to nuke multiple cities if the government don’t give them more plutonium than they have access to.
Bond swims to Why’s secret underwater base and gets captured again, he manages to break free and gets a disguise (before going through some more terrible mazes, this time filled with giant killer rats and you can only see a small area around Bond). Before entering the final room, you’ll need to create a distraction then enter the final room, with the final confrontation with Dr. Why where you have to perform the right actions at the perfect time. The day is saved, buy Dr. Why has escaped, taking the captured Bond girl with him.
In this final confrontation, you only have to do two things. But unless you’re reading a guide, you’ll likely never be able to figure it out.
One of the items is an inflatable raft. In the final secret base, there’s what looks like just a panel for a machine, but when you hover over it, it says its a garbage disposal, the raft is hidden there. While this is annoying and difficult to spot, it’s at least something you might encounter and split off. The other item you need is impossibly obscure. It can be found during the swimming section before the final base.
If you swim the wrong direction, you’ll come across a screen with a few pieces of seaweed. You can play the game without ever seeing this screen, and you have no reason to fully explore before going on. You may examine one bit of seaweed and it will just state that it’s seaweed. If you examine the correct one, it will mention something stuck in it. However, even then the object you need doesn’t have anything when you hover over it, so you need to keep clicking around that spot for the right pixel to activate picking up the most vital object in the game: an elastic band.
Once you finish, Bond has a big reward ceremony where the leader of the country declares a national holiday in celebration of the super secret spy.
The Stealth Affair has some nice moments, but frustrating gameplay. The dialogue is great in some parts, but other parts haven’t been altered from when the game was parodying Bond. The graphics and sound are very nice, along with the animation, so the presentation is pretty good all round.
The Spy Who Loved Me is a vehicle-based combat game, with a few extra parts to mix things up. The levels vary as the game progresses. For this one, I ended up playing the Atari ST version over the Amiga version, as the emulator I used for the Amiga didn’t like it.
The first two levels have similar gameplay. You drive upwards, dodging enemies, shooting them and collecting Q coins. There are civilians hanging out on the road, and you’ll lose points for hitting them – but squishing them is so satisfying and the best part of the game that I did it anyway.
The first level transitions from a car to a boat (the gameplay doesn’t change) and finishes once you stop at the end. The second is a looping track – you need to collect enough Q coins to purchase a submarine upgrade to finish the level. The big flaw with these levels are that, even though you can go fast, it’s much more beneficial to go slow – enemies eliminate your easily if you travel by speed, and going slower helps avoid obstacles and collect coins.
The third level turns the game into an extremely tough vertical scrolling shooter. Power ups float down from the top of the screen and you’ll need some upgrades to stand a chance against the level’s boss.
Next is a short lightgun-style level. The screen doesn’t move, just shoot people until you make it through the enemies.
After that is a codebreaker, like the Mastermind board game. This level is also a form of copy protection – you need to enter coordinates from the game’s manual to proceed.
The final proper level is a Jetski level, it plays similar to the first two, but more focus on shooting than dodging obstacles.
The final part is another lightgun-style section, shoot some enemies, and then jaws to beat the game.
The vehicles section might have been fun if enemies weren’t bullet sponges and dealt so much damage, while the others sections are just tedious. This is Domark’s last James Bond film tie-in, so they went out on a low note.
The first two levels have similar gameplay. You drive upwards, dodging enemies, shooting them and collecting Q coins. There are civilians hanging out on the road, and you’ll lose points for hitting them – but squishing them is so satisfying and the best part of the game that I did it anyway.
The first level transitions from a car to a boat (the gameplay doesn’t change) and finishes once you stop at the end. The second is a looping track – you need to collect enough Q coins to purchase a submarine upgrade to finish the level. The big flaw with these levels are that, even though you can go fast, it’s much more beneficial to go slow – enemies eliminate your easily if you travel by speed, and going slower helps avoid obstacles and collect coins.
The third level turns the game into an extremely tough vertical scrolling shooter. Power ups float down from the top of the screen and you’ll need some upgrades to stand a chance against the level’s boss.
Next is a short lightgun-style level. The screen doesn’t move, just shoot people until you make it through the enemies.
After that is a codebreaker, like the Mastermind board game. This level is also a form of copy protection – you need to enter coordinates from the game’s manual to proceed.
The final proper level is a Jetski level, it plays similar to the first two, but more focus on shooting than dodging obstacles.
The final part is another lightgun-style section, shoot some enemies, and then jaws to beat the game.
The vehicles section might have been fun if enemies weren’t bullet sponges and dealt so much damage, while the others sections are just tedious. This is Domark’s last James Bond film tie-in, so they went out on a low note.
Coming from developers Quixel, Licence to Kill is a vertical scrolling shooter depicting events from Licence to Kill. The game is comprised of 5 very short, but difficult, missions, with some fun gameplay. While the style of the game remained the same throughout, the gameplay itself varies through each level.
The first mission has you chasing a jeep in a helicopter. If you fly fast, the helicopter will get lower, allowing you to attack the jeep. The objective is to get to the end of the level, but destroying the jeep will help with the start of the second level.
Next up is an on foot section, which is the longest level of the game (around 3-4 minutes). If you hold the fire button, you can adjust your aim to shoot diagonal or sideways. There’s no automatic scrolling in this one, so you can kill enemies at your own pace.
Then you take to the skies as you dangle from a helicopter, there’s no enemies here, you just need to stay on top of the plane long enough for Bond to lock on to it.
In the water, Bond has no weapons, but can punch divers carrying harpoons to attack other enemies. You can also dive underwater to dodge enemy fire. You need to latch on to the water plane to get back in the sky.
In the final mission, you start off in a plane before jumping onto a truck. You then have to destroy all the other trucks to stop Sanchez and defeat the game.
The game is good fun, but once you figure out what to do in each level, it’s incredibly short – around 12 minutes if you don’t rush.
The first mission has you chasing a jeep in a helicopter. If you fly fast, the helicopter will get lower, allowing you to attack the jeep. The objective is to get to the end of the level, but destroying the jeep will help with the start of the second level.
Next up is an on foot section, which is the longest level of the game (around 3-4 minutes). If you hold the fire button, you can adjust your aim to shoot diagonal or sideways. There’s no automatic scrolling in this one, so you can kill enemies at your own pace.
Then you take to the skies as you dangle from a helicopter, there’s no enemies here, you just need to stay on top of the plane long enough for Bond to lock on to it.
In the water, Bond has no weapons, but can punch divers carrying harpoons to attack other enemies. You can also dive underwater to dodge enemy fire. You need to latch on to the water plane to get back in the sky.
In the final mission, you start off in a plane before jumping onto a truck. You then have to destroy all the other trucks to stop Sanchez and defeat the game.
The game is good fun, but once you figure out what to do in each level, it’s incredibly short – around 12 minutes if you don’t rush.
This game was in development before there were any plans to make a Live and Let Die game. Publishers Domark saw Aquablast under development. Aquablast was a speedboat action game and, because there’s a speedboat sequence in Live and Let Die, decided to help publish it as a Bond game – although only in the UK, it was still released as Aquablast in the USA.
Live and Let Die has you operating a speedboat equipped with a gun and missiles. The gun is simple enough to use, but the missiles can only be fired if you go fast enough first then fire when slowing down. These need to be saved for certain targets, but you can collect more (as well as fuel) from crates dropped by helicopters.
As you play, you’ll weave through enemies and dodge obstacles, and there’s a decent amount of both, including narrow areas with walls, planes dropping torpedoes and slides you have to use to dodge rocks. The game consists of four missions.
The first is a training mission with infinite fuel and missiles. Here you have to destroy red targets with your gun and black targets with your missiles. Then there are North Pole and Sahara levels, where you can practice using limited missiles and fuel. The levels have a different look but all feel exactly the game.
The final mission is New Orleans, once you hit a certain number of points, you need to destroy Mr. Big’s base by firing a missile from mid-air (you do this by hitting a log).
The gameplay is fun but, due to the game never changing, wears off very quickly. This is fine for a quick blast but it’s also obvious that this was never designed to be a Bond game. If Domark had waited another year, they could have used a much better speedboat combat game called Cobra Triangle.
Live and Let Die has you operating a speedboat equipped with a gun and missiles. The gun is simple enough to use, but the missiles can only be fired if you go fast enough first then fire when slowing down. These need to be saved for certain targets, but you can collect more (as well as fuel) from crates dropped by helicopters.
As you play, you’ll weave through enemies and dodge obstacles, and there’s a decent amount of both, including narrow areas with walls, planes dropping torpedoes and slides you have to use to dodge rocks. The game consists of four missions.
The first is a training mission with infinite fuel and missiles. Here you have to destroy red targets with your gun and black targets with your missiles. Then there are North Pole and Sahara levels, where you can practice using limited missiles and fuel. The levels have a different look but all feel exactly the game.
The final mission is New Orleans, once you hit a certain number of points, you need to destroy Mr. Big’s base by firing a missile from mid-air (you do this by hitting a log).
The gameplay is fun but, due to the game never changing, wears off very quickly. This is fine for a quick blast but it’s also obvious that this was never designed to be a Bond game. If Domark had waited another year, they could have used a much better speedboat combat game called Cobra Triangle.
1987
The second Domark game for James Bond, this time based on The Living Daylights. This one has a single consistent gameplay style throughout the whole game. It’s a run-and-gun shooter, but with a control method that is an interesting idea but doesn’t quite work.
Shooting works a lot like a lightgun game – place your cursor over the enemy and fire to kill them. However, the game doesn’t scroll automatically, you have to move Bond yourself. To do this, you move the cursor to the right side of the screen and carry on holding right. You can also jump by pressing up while still moving right – something that took me a few levels to figure out, as Bond just kept falling over obstacles every now and then.
If the cursor was fast and more precise, this might work, but as you’re moving, enemies can pop up on the left side, meaning that it takes a while to move the cursor over to them.
Original Release: 1987
Developer: Sculptured Software, Walking Circles Software De Re Software, Exasoft
Publisher: Domark
Platform: Commodore 64, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Amstrad PCW, MSX, Atari, BBC Micro, Arcade (possibly)
Version played: Commodore 64
The Living Daylights (Commodore 64)
The second Domark game for James Bond, this time based on The Living Daylights. This one has a single consistent gameplay style throughout the whole game. It’s a run-and-gun shooter, but with a control method that is an interesting idea but doesn’t quite work.
Shooting works a lot like a lightgun game – place your cursor over the enemy and fire to kill them. However, the game doesn’t scroll automatically, you have to move Bond yourself. To do this, you move the cursor to the right side of the screen and carry on holding right. You can also jump by pressing up while still moving right – something that took me a few levels to figure out, as Bond just kept falling over obstacles every now and then.
If the cursor was fast and more precise, this might work, but as you’re moving, enemies can pop up on the left side, meaning that it takes a while to move the cursor over to them.
The Living Daylights (Commodore 64)
After you finish a level, you can choose a special weapon for the next level. The weapons changes the strength of your shot, but don’t alter any graphics, so Bond’s “Bazooka” kills enemies in one shot, but Bond is still holding a pistol. One option at the end of the first level is an Infrared Sight. If you don’t choose this, all the enemies will be shadows, and this is the only level with civilians – shoot them and you’ll lose points. If the Bazooka is available, definitely choose that for other levels.
While the first few levels are incredibly grey, there’s a bit of colour late on. The graphics make use of the Commodore 64 quite well, with some nice locations. You’ll encounter a few different enemies. Most are at the “back”, but a few will stand in your way and throw bombs at you (the first of these throws explosive milk bottles). The game also has some nice music to go with it.
The Living Daylights is a decent game, hampered by the awkward controls. It doesn’t really do anything special, but it also isn’t horrible in any way.
Shooting works a lot like a lightgun game – place your cursor over the enemy and fire to kill them. However, the game doesn’t scroll automatically, you have to move Bond yourself. To do this, you move the cursor to the right side of the screen and carry on holding right. You can also jump by pressing up while still moving right – something that took me a few levels to figure out, as Bond just kept falling over obstacles every now and then.
If the cursor was fast and more precise, this might work, but as you’re moving, enemies can pop up on the left side, meaning that it takes a while to move the cursor over to them.
Original Release: 1987
Developer: Sculptured Software, Walking Circles Software De Re Software, Exasoft
Publisher: Domark
Platform: Commodore 64, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Amstrad PCW, MSX, Atari, BBC Micro, Arcade (possibly)
Version played: Commodore 64
The Living Daylights (Commodore 64)
The second Domark game for James Bond, this time based on The Living Daylights. This one has a single consistent gameplay style throughout the whole game. It’s a run-and-gun shooter, but with a control method that is an interesting idea but doesn’t quite work.
Shooting works a lot like a lightgun game – place your cursor over the enemy and fire to kill them. However, the game doesn’t scroll automatically, you have to move Bond yourself. To do this, you move the cursor to the right side of the screen and carry on holding right. You can also jump by pressing up while still moving right – something that took me a few levels to figure out, as Bond just kept falling over obstacles every now and then.
If the cursor was fast and more precise, this might work, but as you’re moving, enemies can pop up on the left side, meaning that it takes a while to move the cursor over to them.
The Living Daylights (Commodore 64)
After you finish a level, you can choose a special weapon for the next level. The weapons changes the strength of your shot, but don’t alter any graphics, so Bond’s “Bazooka” kills enemies in one shot, but Bond is still holding a pistol. One option at the end of the first level is an Infrared Sight. If you don’t choose this, all the enemies will be shadows, and this is the only level with civilians – shoot them and you’ll lose points. If the Bazooka is available, definitely choose that for other levels.
While the first few levels are incredibly grey, there’s a bit of colour late on. The graphics make use of the Commodore 64 quite well, with some nice locations. You’ll encounter a few different enemies. Most are at the “back”, but a few will stand in your way and throw bombs at you (the first of these throws explosive milk bottles). The game also has some nice music to go with it.
The Living Daylights is a decent game, hampered by the awkward controls. It doesn’t really do anything special, but it also isn’t horrible in any way.