James’s Point and Click Adventure

It seems like the best way to adapt the James BondThe world's most famous secret agent, James Bond has starred not only in dozens of books but also one of the most famous, and certainly the longest running, film franchises of all time. license is to make an adventure title. We’ve seen a number of James Bond games in our coverage for the site, but most of them had tried to distill the secret agent’s adventures down to a few specific gameplay elements. They’ve tried to make his movies in arcade-style games, full of quick action and twitch adventure. But in doing so they lost much of what made those adventures compelling. I’m not going to try and argue that the 1973 film Live and Let Die is good (it’s really not), but it’s certainly more than just a series of boat sequences, despite what the Domark-published title of the same name would have you believe.

In fact of all the games we’ve looked at so far, the one that’s done the best at actually adapting the feel and mystique of a James Bond adventure was Mindscape’s 1986 text adventure James Bond 007: Goldfinger, an adaptation of Goldfinger that, while not true to the source material, felt like a fully fleshed out James Bond story. It worked because it let you take your time, savoring the many aspects of a James Bond tale. It was interesting in ways so many of the arcade adventures were not.

One would have to assume, then, that it would only be a matter of time before some company came along and made a graphic adventure game that could do what James Bond 007: Goldfinger attempted, just with pretty visuals to go along with the storytelling. And such was the case in 1990 with the Delphine Software developed Operation Stealth which, in the United States, was edited and rebranded into James Bond: The Stealth Affair. And, as far as graphical, point-and-click adventures are concerned, it’s actually not bad.

The game focuses on our secret agent, John Glames (aka James Bond in the U.S. release), a CIA agent (or, at least, MI6 agent on loan to the CIA) assigned with tracking down a newly designed high-tech F-19 type stealth plane, which went missing in Latin America after it was stolen from NAS Miramar. James… I mean, John ships out immediately, heading to Santa Paragua. There he meets up with another agent, who is seemingly killed soon after. The agent gives him access to a safe deposit box, but once John goes to open the box, the agent, and a couple of goons, show up. He was really Colonel Karpov of the KGB and he just needed John to open the box so the Soviets could get what was inside.

The Russians then trap John in a cave and leave him for dead but, of course, he escapes. He makes his way back into town, heads to the hotel and gets wrapped up in the affairs of Julia Manigua, the niece of President Manigua, who has been battling against Dr. Why and his agents from Spyder. With John’s help Julia hopes to stop Spyder’s efforts in Santa Paragua, and in the process John can use her help to get to the stealth fighter and take it from enemy hands. If only they could stay ahead of the bad guys instead of constantly getting captured by them at every turn…

Even without the official license in most territories, Operation Stealth is a James Bond adventure through and through. You have your tuxedoed agent going from location to location, collecting gadgets, meeting women, and fighting off goons. All of it is in service of a mission to stop (and maybe destroy) an all-powerful terrorist organization hellbent on world domination. Change a few names (as this game does) and you have an easy conversion into a James Bond game without even having to try. Clearly the publishers wanted to make a James Bond adventure and, for most countries, they weren’t going to let a pesky thing like licensing get in the way of their efforts.

Credit where it’s due, this game does nail most of the beats of a James Bond adventure. You get to do a fair bit of espionage, collecting evidence and finding solutions to problems. And then, occasionally, danger comes and you have to think fast and perform some twitch action in arcade-style sequences that test your reflexes. It all combines into a decent little package that never lingers on one set piece for too long before shifting gears and giving you something else to focus on. For fans of graphical adventures, this game does offer a lot to like.

With that said, the game isn’t perfect by any means. For starters, its parsing system is a tad clunky. It uses a text-based menu where you select commands and then point at objects to use those commands on the objects. It’s effective, but it doesn’t really work as well as other modes of input. I kept wishing I could simply type in commands in a text bar to get John to do anything. That or I really needed full icons to represent each of the actions to make it all easier to parse and use.

Beyond that, this game has the classic issue shared by so many other graphic adventures: if you don’t know what you’re doing you’re going to get lost, quickly. While this game doesn’t have a ton of scenes, and its inventory isn’t overloaded, there are still plenty of instances where you can easily miss an item that you need for later. If you skip out on something you need two or three scenes down the road when it’s required, you’re just hosed. Hope you have a save back in the last section you needed, and can remember everything you did, because otherwise you’re going to have to start everything over again.

And, of course, the game doesn’t really hold your hand at all. You get dropped in, after an opening story sequence, and have to stumble your way blindly through the game. This isn’t the most complex adventure game I’ve played (it’s nowhere near as cruel as Police Quest, for example), but there is still a learning curve you have to account for. If you can’t find everything you need, you’ll get stumped fast and likely will give up on the game instead of seeing it through.

The worse thing about the game, though, is that it feels pretty derivative. I’ve played a number of classic Sierra games, and Operation Stealth reminded me a lot of Space Quest. It’s a bit silly in places, with a decent bit of tongue-in-cheek humor. But then when you get into the last act of the game, where you infiltrate Dr. Why’s base, it felt like a remake of the alien based sequence from Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter. You dress up as an enemy agent, sneak around futuristic hallways, and try to do as much damage as you can. I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d played this before, in a game that had come out four years prior.

That’s not to say Operation Stealth is bad, just that it’s not as good as the genre could create. It’s a bit clunky, a bit mean, and it struggles to truly stand out from the crowd. For anyone looking for a solid James Bond adventure you could certainly do much worse than this title. It does its job pretty well and gets out before it gets bogged down too much. But as far as graphical adventures are concerned, this title is solidly stuck in the middle of the pack. It’s not bad but it’s not stupendous either. Sadly, that still makes it better than most James Bond games that were on the market at the time.