The Peril of the PAWS!

Officially 1984’s internationally released, cross-platform title Shaken but Not Stirred was the first James Bond title. Unofficially, it was beaten to the market by a ZX Spectrum exclusive text-adventure developed by Richard Shepherd Software. Strange as it probably seems now, with high-def graphics and hi-fidelity sound (and whatever other “high” words you want to apply), there was a time when the popular games were text adventures. It makes sense, of course, since computers of the very early eras really weren’t great at producing graphics. Why look at boxy, three-color pink, cyan, and gray graphics when you could have all the graphics… in your mind!

The upside of a text adventure for the era was that you were freer to tell a story within the bounds of the hardware than you could be with graphical games. Text allowed the developer to write in detailed descriptions, to set mood and ambiance with words instead of trying to scrawl it on screen with (even by those days’ standards) rudimentary graphics. You could make something ugly visually or you could make something intriguing in someone’s imagination. Text adventures became de rigueur for a time, right up until graphical text adventures (of the like Sierra Games produced in their various Quest franchises) gobbled up the market.

For those few, scant years when text adventures were king, a few companies popped up to try and grab all they could from the market. One British studio, Richard Shepherd Software Ltd, was founded by an accountant, Richard Shepherd, who found he had an interest, and a knack, for coding on the ZX81 personal computer. This shifted, naturally enough, to the ZX Spectrum when it was released, and soon enough the company was shooting out regular text adventures for all their fans to snatch up. This lasted about three years, until the market fell out for text adventures entirely, but it was a three year stretch where the company cranked out 16 games. Considering the group only had two programmers, Richard Shepherd and Pete Cooke, that’s a spoiled library of games.

One of those titles was Shaken but Not Stirred, the Richard Shepherd Software Ltd that didn’t really bother with being “official” or “licensed”. It was a James Bond adventure that gave you a chance (through text) to put yourself in the shoes of the world’s most famous secret agent. It had the gadgets, it had the international travel, it had the megalomaniacal evil criminal mastermind looking to take over the world. It even had a boss breathing down your neck about all the trouble you were causing. It was James Bond through and through… just not officially.

In the game, the evil Dr. Death has threatened to blow up London via a nuclear strike. M contacts Bond and tells the agent that he has to go travel the world and figure out where Dr. Death is hiding. After a visit with Q, where Bond is able to select a few choice items to help him on his way (among them a garrote, a poison dart gun, a knife, and a pistol). Then Bond has to go out and figure out what places to travel to and where the likely clues for his adventure might be hidden.

This first part of the game is somewhat basic. Presented with a list of locations – London, Vienna, Cairo, Paris, Rome, Munich, New York, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Moscow – the player selects one, and then gets a brief scene about what happens at the location. Sometimes there will be a mysterious vase of flowers in Bond’s hotel room. Other times there will be a taxi ominously waiting for Bond. Each location will have a randomized series of adventures to partake from, and these will all (if the player successfully gets through these moments) lead to either a cipher that has to be decoded, or a letter to be used in the decoded word. The cipher will tell Bond the location of Dr. Death’s secret island (and it can be different every time), which, once the player figures it out, can be typed into the game to start the second chapter.

Once the island is discovered, Bond will travel there to find Dr. Death. He’ll have to explore the island (a randomized, 10x10 grid of squares) to find the entrance to Dr. Death’s secret base. These sections will include sea, beach, fields, mountains, dark forest, and plantations. Somewhere on the island is a secret cache of benzedrine tablets (to replenish Bond’s health), and, of course, the entrance itself is hidden somewhere. All it takes is exploration, luck (since you will be regularly attacked by enemies and will have to find a way through), and good mapping skills.

This part of the game is interesting since it’s a complete switch in function from the code-breaking, location hopping adventure we had before. The fact that the island is randomized is a nice touch as it means you won’t be able to simply map out the island and figure out where to go every time. It does mean that if, for some reason, you fail your mission and have to go back to the beginning you’ll have to map the whole island again, but it also means that each time you play the game you’ll be getting a new experience.

I will say, though, that the locations on the island could use more description. The zones are presented as basic terrain, sea and mountains and so forth, but you don’t get any descriptors to make it feel like Bond is really there. “You are in the sea,” for instance instead of saying, “you are swimming in the open sea, the warm water lapping around you as you tread water.” The former is functional and does get the job done, but the latter gives you a sense of the character actually experiencing the adventure. I know which one I’d prefer.

Finally, once you find the base you have to get through the maze to reach Dr. Death’s control room. This maze, of course, is randomized each play session. It’s presented with a 3D-style perspective, like most classic dungeon crawlers of the era, and it has simple controls to get you through. There’s no time limit, and while you only have limited chances to look at the map you’re provided, you can still brute force your way through if you have to. The only real danger is PAWS, the steel-fisted villain stalking the maze like a minotaur (think Jaws, the Bond villain, just unofficially). All you gotta do is move, navigate, and figure it out.

But once you get to that lab you still have one more obstacle in your way Dr. Death has coded his machine and you have to break the code to shut down the nuclear launch. The mini-game plays like Mastermind. You have ten chances to figure out the four-digit, all-number sequence. Any right answers in the wrong spots show a yellow square (although the game doesn’t let you know which ones are right) while correct numbers in the right spots get a red square. You have to decipher the digits, and order, to stop the launch.

Of course, in the time it took for you to stop the launch Dr. Death has scarpered off, like he’s pretending to be Carmen Sandiego, leaving you to go back home, sip a martini, and once again go out in search of the evil villain. It’s all in a day’s work for an international man of mystery, of course.

I rather liked parts of Shaken but Not Stirred. The various game modes all stitched together give the game a fun feel of exploration and adventure. Each chapter is so different that you end up feeling like you never know what will happen next… the first time you play through it. Once you’ve tackled the missions, though, it’s hard to get as excited again for the next playthrough. Sure, everything is randomized, but there isn’t a lot to the game besides the puzzles. There’s no ambiance, no sense of reality to the game. It’s just, “go here, see this, do the next thing,” over and over in very short blocks of text. A little more style and creativity to the writing could have gone a long way towards livening up the experience.

Functionally Shaken but Not Stirred is a competent, interesting game for a single playthrough. But after that, it’s hard to get up the energy to want to play it again. For this text adventure once is very much enough.