 Sssssmmm NEST DRUngk When I was a kid, I always resented stuff like James Bond, Jr. Like, what? You think I'm not cut out for the REAL James Bond? I was nine years old when the James Bond, Jr. animated series started in 1991 and by that time I had already seen Doctor No, Goldfinger, Live and Let Die, A View to a Kill and probably several other Bond movies at that point. Alright, that's probably because my dad is a huge James Bond fan but they played those movies on cable ALL THE FREAKIN TIME But yeah, I enjoyed the hell out of James Bond as a kid, I didn't need no James Bond Jr. Anyway, that's just a long way of saying I don't have any frame of reference for the James Bond Jr. TV show, so when I play the Super Nintendo game I don't know how well it represents the source material. I can say, however, that I have many, many frames of reference for terrible video games, so I feel like I'm pretty qualified to call James Bond Jr. a terrible game, so here goes. James Bond Jr. fricking sucks. And it's not just your garden variety level of suck, either. There are some good ideas here, along with quite a bit of gameplay variety, but everything is executed so, so poorly. I mean, just look at the sprite animation here, it's atrocious. And the controls are your classic mishmash of loose, floaty, and jank as hell. This game was developed by Grey Matter, and they did produce a perfectly okay game in BOB, you know, that game starring an ant robot thing. But they also made crap like the incredible Crash Dummies and Wayne's World, two truly awful games, so yeah, it should not be a surprise that this one's no good, either. You get five lives with unlimited continues, and you switch between platforming stages and horizontal scrolling shoot-em-up stages across six levels, and there is a password system here as well. For the platforming sections, B jumps, B and down allows your character to roll, A punches, X kicks, and Y throws, what's a grenade, I guess? But as you can see, this just looks god-awful, and it plays just as badly as it looks. It's like playing bad platforming bingo. We got a floaty jump. We got bad sprite animation. We got unresponsive attacks, lazy enemy patterns that were probably thrown together in about two minutes, long levels that send you wandering around in no particular direction looking for god knows what, enemies that can hurt you from off-screen, anyone got bingo yet? And if that weren't enough, check out this music. What's the deal with these early Super Nintendo soundtracks? Seriously, I've heard some bad video game music, but I am in awe of how bad this is. Like, how is it off-time? It's a program! Did they deliberately make it like this? Those icons are picking up are either extra bombs, or power-ups that increase your speed or jump range, and at least one other projectile attack, but it's nothing special. The structure is really the only interesting thing here. You start with a platforming segment that lasts about 20 seconds before you're moved to a shoot-em-up level, which goes on seemingly forever, and while this is better than crap like D-Force, it's not exactly gonna compete with Axolay or anything like that. After that, it's an endless platforming section, and if you manage to get through that, you're racing in a boat down a river, dodging stuff and going off of jumps. And it'd actually be pretty fun if the sound design and music weren't so freaking awful. James Bond Jr. also got a game on the NES, and it's actually not terrible. It's a pretty standard action platformer for the time, albeit really long and brutally difficult, but the main thing it has going for it is the complete opposite of the SNES game. It's the music! It's so good! So yeah, if you're jonesing for a James Bond Jr. game for whatever reason, go with the NES game, because the Super Nintendo game makes Bubsy look like a masterpiece by comparison. You know, it really kind of sucks, because honest to God, I'm going into games like this blind. I want these games to be good, and I try and pick out positive stuff, but with James Bond Jr. it's just... I guess the boat level's okay? And that's seriously it. Avoid this game. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.