James Bond 007 A View To A Kill (PC, 5 1/4" Disk) Mindscape - 1985 USA, Canada Release

James Bond 007 A View To A Kill
Product ID	50047-85097
Product UPC	050047850977
Platform(s)	PC
Packaging	Book + Disk
Media	5 1/4" Disk
Copyright date	1985
Publisher(s)	Mindscape
Category(s)	Entertainment, Adventure, Text
Country of Origin	United States of America

Description from the packaging.

Adventure above and beyond all other Bonds. You grip your ski poles tightly as the snow above your head suddenly explodes with ricocheting Russian bullets. "All right, 007," you tell yourself, "let's get on with it."

And so begins an adventure that takes you from Siberia to Paris to San Francisco as you pursue the evil industrialist Max Zorin.

Silicon Valley's fate rests in your hands... because your name is Bond, James Bond. And only you can defuse the madman's plot.

Experience all the action, excitement, and romance of James Bond in this interactive fiction adventure from Mindscape.

System Requirements

PC Boot Software
Required CPU	XT 8088/8086
Required RAM	128K

PCjr
Required RAM	256K

Box Scans

Reviews

Questbusters July, 1986 Volume III, Number 7

Would you buy this game if you didn't see the film? If so, you're in trouble, for the first problem is a skullsmasher that's near impossible without information obtained only in the film. Atop a Siberian mountain, surrounded by snow and Russian soldiers, you (as James Bond) must find the body of 003. That's easy, but neither the game nor the manual provides a clue as to the next step. I searched and examined the body, looked under and all around it, and was told only that 003 had been shot to death. Finally I recalled the film's opening scene, in which Bond retrieved a microchip from the body, and said "get microchip."

Only then did I learn 003 was wearing a watch, where the chip was concealed. If I hadn't seen the film, I would have given up before the game was off to a good start. Maybe the designers figured people wouldn't play this game unless they'd seen the movie. Even so, the response to "search body" ought to point out the watch. It's an inexcusable "failure to communicate" that should be remedied in future versions.

After that scene, however, this all-text story doesn't suffer from the same kind of oversight. Problems are based on often obvious object manipulation and occasional character interaction that consists of asking someone about a key word in his previous response. Mandatory Bond characters like M, Q, and Moneypenny are effectively portrayed. The villain this time is Max Zorin, a renegade Russian scientist who wants to wipe out Silicon Valley so he can dominate the global microchip market.

Faithfully recreating the film's plot, the adventure takes you from Siberia to London to get an assignment from M and some hitech gadgets from Q, then it's on to the Eiffel Tower to view yet another kill. Ultimately you'll wind up in California, where Zorin plans to trigger a massive earthquake near the San Andreas fault. Logical puzzles have been worked into key turning points of the story, so even those who saw the film can't just stroll through without getting killed a few times. (Mindscape adventures are among the deadliest and most unforgiving; one wrong move and it's time to reboot.)

The text is well-written and exhibits the dry sense of humor that is the Bond trademark. When I goofed by parachuting off the Eiffel Tower, thus ending the game prematurely, I was told I had "broken several rules in the Napoleonic Code." After drinking a martini, "stirred, not shaken," on the plane, I got off in France and felt "shaken, not stirred." So there's a good read here as well as a lively, well plotted adventure.

Time is the major drawback: you'll need lots of it because the game is poorly programmed and often takes 5-10 seconds to respond to simple commands. And if you get killed, you must wait more than a minute for the entire program to reload. It understands sentences with direct objects and prepositions, but the parser's not up to par with the Infocom or Penguin systems. You can get hard copy of the game, which is always useful.

So if you can put up with the slow response time (so slow I suspect BASIC routines lurking somewhere in the program), this game has a well-paced story tied together at key stages with puzzles that are fair (expect for the initial one) and fun to fool around with. Bond fans will not be disappointed.