James Bond

[sega_SHARK]

So I've been on a quest to get respectable scores on all Parker Brothers titles for the CV. James Bond made it into my play rotation. It's not a great game. It relies too much on twitch reflexes, and you definitely need a manual in order to know what's going on. I finally figured out why it's so hard.

 

The game is really short. It only has four levels. Parker Bros ramped up the difficulty to make the game seem longer.

 

Once I got the hang of it though, I found myself liking it more and more. I understand the game isn't well liked due to to difficulty, but it can be done.

 

 

Took me about three weeks to get a 007 rating, you have to beat the game on the difficult setting with minimal deaths.

 

I'm really impressed with myself right now.

Here's an Ursula Andress pic:

 

 

 

 

 

 

[ColecoDan]

See if pictures like that were my gift for getting a 007 rating I would try harder.

[NIAD]

See if pictures like that were my gift for getting a 007 rating I would try harder.

If it was a more current pic, would you still be so willing?

[Pixelboy]

Playing "007 - James Bond" on ColecoVision long enough to get good at it and get a good ranking... That's probably the very definition of "masochism" in some geeky online urban dictionary.

 

Please promise me you'll regain some measure of sanity (and dignity) by playing a few rounds of Spy Hunter.

[NIAD]

Better yet, play a lot of rounds of Ikrananka's version of Moon Patrol... which James Bond 007 borrows from heavily.

[sega_SHARK]

Better yet, play a lot of rounds of Ikrananka's version of Moon Patrol... which James Bond 007 borrows from heavily.

Now I feel like a real dingus. I never noticed that it's basically a Moon Patrol clone with a Bond theme attached.

[digress]

I liked the game. I had it when it was new. I don't think I ever got a 007 rating though I could finsih the game fairly consistently.

 

I like the arcade twitch skills needed. I found it very responisive game.

[sega_SHARK]

Bombing the undersea base in order to get the escape pod in Level 2 Is really the highlight of the game. It's a nice animation, and it's definitely an earned reward after speeding under the boats and helicopters to get there.

 

That level took me the longest to get the hang of. I had to hang back just enough from the boats to dive under and speed up by pressing forward to avoid the missiles. The "speed forward" mechanic took me a while to time out.

 

Several times the game reminded me of Ninja Gaiden. Once you memorize the level, it's fairly straightforward. But man, the game makes you pay for every inch of progress.

[Tempest]

I never cared for it, but I never really gave it a chance either. I need to look at it again.

[TPR]

The game suffers from a pretty bad first level where most people lose attention and don't give it much gameplay time after that. It's really strange to enter a game where you have two different weapons, lots of enemies on screen, but you can't really kill anything and once you figure out you pretty much just have to jump over and avoid everything until you get in the water, you realize that it's kind of not fun. And of course most people get killed by the green thing at the very start before you even know what happened because it's not clear you need to jump over it. So of course games that start with "What? What happened? Why did I just die???" usually don't set the stage to be well liked.

 

And then the rest of the game just has some pretty bad pacing and enemy placement. I realize that a lot of people interpret that has being "hard" but in reality its just sloppy game design. The controls are very responsive, which is a plus, but there really are a lot of frustrating elements to the game. The first time you see the oil rig at the end of the first level, what do you do? Do you shoot it? Jump over it? Duck under it? It's not clear at all that you're supposed to jump over and land on top of it. I think the first time I played I died like four times right there trying to figure that part out.

 

It's not the worst game out there, but it's not great, IMO.

[Jordiway]

_{This was one of the last colecovision games I bought new in the 80's I think centipede was the last but anyway I played this game a lot as a kid and for some reason I really liked it and beat it many times but I never paid attention to the rating.}