Even the Text Feels His Machismo

In the early days of video gaming, games only had limited ways to convey their story (assuming they even had a story to begin with). They could use limited graphics to craft their adventure, or they could go the route of being all-text. The former could take a number of directions, from basic platforming, to driving games, to sing-screen action puzzlers (and many more basic ideas). The latter, though, were text adventures, and the reason so many of them were made was because what the games lacked in graphics they made up for in detailed words and the graphics of your mind.

Text adventures had their heyday in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when computers could only display so much and putting text together was easier than trying to make consoles and computers display anything that looked good (let alone realistic). Entire stories could be written, with the likes of Zork, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos becoming seminal works. Now, that’s not to say that text adventures (interactive fiction, if you prefer that term) went away completely, but the niche in the adventure genre they filled has long been subsumed by more modern formats and games.

Still, for a time they were a popular medium for gamers, so much so that even 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. series had a text title or two. Released around the same time as the Domark A View to a Kill, Mindscape’s James Bond 007: A View to a Kill is also an adaptation of the Roger Moore film of the same name. It takes the familiar material of the movie and reworks it into a high flying, text-based adventure that you’ll type your way through, (largely) scene by scene, until you get James to the end of another harrowing journey. Or, at least, that’s the goal anyway.

If you’ve seen the film then the basic events of the game should seem familiar. Bond starts off on top of a mountain and is forced to find Agent 003, who had been on a mission before MI:6 lost track of them. Once you find them (dead, sadly) you then take the microchip from them and are forced to ski down the slopes to escape the Russian agents following you. At the shore you’re picked up by a mini-sub and after a fateful ride back to England with a Bond girl, you are able to report in to M and get the next stage of your mission: tracking the chip back to wealthy business magnate Max Zorin.

In Paris, Bons chases a gunman to Zorin’s estate, fights with May Day, and then sneaks through the estate to find the evidence he needs. After a quick stop at an auction on the estate, you zip out, heading back to the airport and flying off to San Francisco to investigate further shady dealings. This leads Bond to meet up with Stacey Sutton, and this in turn (after a harrowing escape from a burning building) leads you to follow the clues back to a mine under the control of Zorin where, finally the adventure comes to a head. Bond versus villain for the fate of the world.

For fans that have watched the film, A View to a Kill might just be the adventure they were looking for (at least back in 1985). While both games released that year used the details of the film to flesh out their play experiences, the Mindscape text adventure does feel far more entrenched in the actual world of the film. If you know the characters, and know the actors playing them, likely you imagined these people in the roles as the text scrolled along, letting you see the film as you played the game. You know, in your mind.

With that said, this game is deeply beholden to the events of the film. Everything you saw in the movie is here in the game, yes, but the game also doesn’t tread at all outside the bounds of that story. You ski down a mountain before getting picked up in a sub and magically rushed off immediately to England. You get your next mission and then get whisked away to Paris. Every major beat of the film is here, but all the little side scenes and smaller moments that you know had to have taken place, off screen, are missing. If it wasn’t in the film, it’s not in the game.

This is weird because part of the joy of a text adventure is the exploration of the world around you. If you get put into a location you want to go around, see every room, breathe every detail. Some of the best text adventures have rooms everywhere for you to explore, locations for you to wander through just seeing how deep and rich this world is. James Bond 007: A View to a Kill has all the key locations of the film, beat for beat, but there’s no major reward in taking your time and exploring everything. Hell, more than once the game even says, “you don’t have time to linger.”

Worse, there are times where the game feels like it should give you rich details and encourage you to look around, but the writing doesn’t provide those kinds of details. Basic descriptions, standard dialogue from the movie, tiny drop of details about the characters. It all feels pulled from the movie, but not the world of the movie, leaving the writing shallow and underbaked. Again, if it’s not in the movie it’s not in the game, so you get only the shallowest writing telling you what you could see from the film’s perspective.

Honestly, it feels like the game would have been better if it could have centered on one location, letting Bond fully explore Zorin’s final base, looking through every nook and cranny as you try to defeat the villain with the clues he accidentally left around. As it is, the game never spends enough time in any one location to feel complete. It moves and moves and moves and if you try to color outside the bounds there’s not much you can do. It’s simple. Limited. Based on the movie.

But then, if you just wanted the adventure of the movie, why not go and watch the movie? Sure, home video was still ramping up in the mid-1990s, in comparison to where it would be even a few years later, but there were plenty of rental shops where you could grab A View to a Kill and watch it at home (even if you had no plans to buy it). Considering you can get through this game in under an hour, you’d actually get more time (and probably more enjoyment) out of watching the film than playing through the limited scenes of the game instead.

I like the idea of a James Bond text adventure, one where you can really follow a mission and track it all the way through. This game, though didn’t managed to hook me in that way, and that’s because it wanted me to know the movie and follow the path of that story. Instead of letting me explore the world of James Bond in text form, I was stuck on the path of the movie, and that was far less fun than it should have been.