Previous Next

The name's Bond, James Bond. You might have heard of me. I used to be a top secret agent before the hormone injections stopped working and I had to retire. Now they've replaced me with some upstart from the Royal Shakeapeare Company, and all I have left is my memories, and they're a bit shakey.

One affair I remember well is the Live and Let Die job. It was all to do with a Caribbean dictator planning to destroy America by flooding the country with free drugs. Good luck to him, I said, but M thought otherwise, and I was ordered to deal with the evil Dr Kananga. Imagine my surprise when my exploits were turned into a computer game several years later, and imagine how far my eyebrows rose when I saw what a rotten job they'd done of it. Her Majesty's Secret Service got hold of information indicating that the game was the result of a deal between two shady underworld groups.

D.O.M.A.R.K. and E.L.I.T.E., who discovered that they were working on two such similar games that they decided to merge them together - a pity the result had nothing to do with my adventures. I don't even appear in the game myself - the star of the whole thing is a speedboat!

As part of the mission I have to steer the boat along four waterways; a target practice run, South American jungle, Norwegian Fjords and Middle East Deserts (all very good training for an attack on a Caribbean island, you'll agree). My boat's armed with machine guns to deal with enemy speedboats, mines, fuel drums and other obatacles, and I have to leap over logs, steer through tunnels and negotiate narrow waterways. There are passing helicopters, and riverside gun emplacements to deal with too, but you never get the feel of break-neck speed that gets the old adrenalin going. And damn me if I could find the controls to launch the three missiles I need to smash lock doors; press A+Spacebar as it says in the instructions, and nothing happens. Better have a word with Q about that.

The landscapes are quite pretty but very samey, basically just different colours; they move quite smoothly, but not as smoothly as the belly-dancers in the Purple Pussycat club in Cairo. And they don't even use the music from the film - probably that notorious international terrorist McCartney would have demanded too much in the way of royalties.

On the whole this is one mission I would rather have forgotten. Now let me tell you about the time Goidfinger strapped me to a table and tried to turn me into a soprano with his laser beam...

This one should be locked in HM Government's files and kept top secret.