How the Cyborg Fish Saved Christmas (Robocod)

Member Name: Frankingsteins

Product:	Robocod
Date:	20/11/05 (166 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: An entertaining and involving platform game

Disadvantages: Dated and very similar to its competitors

You’d think that a video game franchise based primarily on fishy puns of popular films and dogged with product placement of Penguin chocolate bars would be disappointing at best, but Millennium’s entertaining piscine romp combined the best elements of platform games over the previous five years and became of the best-loved games of 1991.


PREMISE


In the first game, James Pond was an aquatic secret agent, working for the intelligence agency FI5H against the evil Dr. Maybe. (Yes, some of the more contrived similarities to Bond are a bit pathetic). In ‘Robocod’ the parody is less direct and the layout more accessible, Pond’s goal now simply being to save a load of penguins from Dr. Maybe at the Arctic Toy Factory. He’s, I don’t know… turning them into robots or something. The plot didn’t seem to matter so much in those golden years.

This sets up a nice surreal environment of oversized toys, board games, desserts and other sweet foodstuffs that never really gets tiresome. It also avoids the very tedious underwater setting of the first game by making Pond able to breathe air. The idea of a ‘world map’ was developing in platform games at the time, but ‘Robocod’ promises a little more than it can really offer in this department by allowing the player to select which areas to play, although there are never more than two doors unlocked at a time on the toy factory, a la ‘Mickey Mouse in the Castle of Illusion.’

Now codenamed Robocod, Pond has a metal casing on his body, between his huge head and tail (which he now uses as legs, being literally a fish out of water). This doesn’t really influence gameplay too much, but Pond’s body can extend vertically for as far as the player chooses, being able to grab onto ceilings and platforms along the way, or to land heavily on enemies.


GAMEPLAY


This is primarily a platform game, but one that tries to impress by adding little distractions. The occasional permanently scrolling level means death to the character if the player doesn’t keep up with the action, while breaking a large box every so often will produce one of many different vehicles that can aid progress in the level, from mundane items such as toy cars and trains to the really strange flying bath. Robocod’s movements are controlled in the usual way, whether using the joystick or joypad: left and right move him in those directions, up causes him to jump and down sees him ducking into his suit.

The enemies are dispatched by jumping on their heads in classic non-violent, simplistic platform game style, while boxes can be knocked to reveal items that either increase the player’s health or lives, or simply their score (an increasingly outdated facet of arcade games that still survived but didn’t mean too much any more). After every couple of levels, Pond can choose whether to continue to the next stage or face the themed enemy boss: either way, all doors must be unlocked to complete the game and face Dr. Maybe.

There are secret exits and passages in many levels, adding another element of enjoyment that is a credit to the programmers, but the usual way to complete a level is to rescue (read ‘run into’) the penguins you can find until the exit beacon flashes and you can approach it.


GRAPHICS & SOUND


This is an area in which the game both excels and becomes very, very annoying. James Pond 2 is bright and colourful, and when playing on a television as opposed to a monitor, the slight blurring effect really does injure the eyes over time. It all looks quite nice though, and everything is easily discernible in the way that the first game occasionally wasn’t.

There is no voice acting in this game, and the sound effects are all very basic, repetitive and unrealistic. The music is the usual cheery 16-bit soundtrack common to all games at the time, but it does sound a little more festive as yet another subtle Christmas theme running through the multi-religion-acceptable game. The compositions do get repetitive, repeating every so often even as play advances to the higher levels that have little else in common with the beginning, and this is a little distracting.


VERDICT


1991 was the year of Sonic: the Hedgehog with attitude, and Robocod’s polite rescue of toys so that Christmas can go ahead seemed, in contrast, a little childish. Millennium evidently tried to increase competition by repackaging the case to feature a less cutesy and gormless Robocod, transforming him to an eyebrow-tilting cool character holding a gun. Such weapons are not present in the game, but perhaps it was also necessary to give some controversy to the otherwise family-friendly game. This was the era of gangsta rap after all, it wasn’t just the Hedgehog’s domain.

Robocod is a pretty hard game, but very addictive and entertaining. If I admit that it has taken me ten years to complete I’d probably be misleading you on its true longevity: rest assured that years passed where I didn’t even put the floppy disc into the Amiga, but I finally got round to it. Better than the early Mario games, but not as good as the following year’s ‘Super Mario World,’ Robocod is the peak of the shorter-lived James Pond franchise which ended with the disappointing third game in 1994 and whatever irrelevant spin-offs were brought out in-between.

The Bond and secret agent jokes are hardly present at all, which is good as that’s very distracting when foregrounded in the later ‘James Pond 3: Operation StarFI5H.’ Robocod remains a platform classic and proof that, with the right people for the job, you really can start with just a title.

Summary: The second in the James Pond video game series (1991)