He Loves Gooooooold

We’ve touched briefly before on 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. video games, especially text adventures based on the adventures of the world famous secret agent (an oxymoron in terms that the films never address). We even went over a couple of text adventures for 007 specifically, from the official (James Bond 007: A View to a Kill) to the unofficial (Shaken but Not Stirred). Now we’re back, after I’ve spent some time watching through various James Bond films for the podcast, and it seems like as good a time as ever to continue our dive through the secret agents games to see just what else he has to offer.

Today’s adventure is sort of a sequel, but sort of not, to a game we just mentioned, Mindscape’s James Bond 007: A View to a Kill. But while that game covered a Roger Moor adventure from the 1980s, here we have a Sean Connery tale from the 1960s, and, really, his most famous one. I don’t think there’s a James Bond fan alive that would argue that Goldfinger is one of the character’s best movies ever, and if you were going to tackle any title from his long back catalog it only makes sense to take on his best adventure, period (making EA’s decision to tackle the inferior From Russia with Love in 2005 all the more infuriating).

But this isn’t a straight adaptation of the story as you would have seen it in the film. Unlike another text adventure we looked at, Rambo: First Blood Part II from 1985, this game takes a ton of liberties with the story, going pretty far afield to tell something fun for adventure fans without staying beholden to the hard details of the film. It’s a good remixing of ideas that lets fans of the character have an adventure that takes some guess work without straying so far that you feel like you’re playing something wholly invented by the game makers themselves.

The adventure starts on a Swiss road as James, with Bond girl Tilly in the passenger seat, tearing down the road as they’re pursued by Auric Goldfinger’s Korean agents (just don’t think too hard about Korean agents in the Swiss Alps). Through quick thinking, and good navigation, the player is able to elude the chasing cars, eventually eliminating them one-by-one until James and Tilly are safe. James is then able to scale down into, Auric Goldfinger’s Swiss factory (ditching Tilly, leaving her with the car, we presume, and her life intact, which I suppose is a better ending for the girl than what she got in the movie), all so he can explore around and see what the villain is up to.

What Bond stumbles on is the plans, and the means, for Goldfinger to cause massive destruction. After collecting blueprints, and a forgotten gold ingot, James is able to travel to Goldfinger’s stud ranch in Kentucky, where he can snoop around and turn Auric’s agent, Pussy Galore, to Bond’s side. Together they reveal the plan to irradiate all the gold in Fort Knox and crash the financial market. It’s only with Pussy’s help that the two are able to stop the plan, deactivating the nuke before it can be used and, in the process, eliminating Goldfinger. It’s all in a day’s work for Bond and his various girls.

As should easily be evidenced, James Bond 007: Goldfinger isn’t too concerned with being truly faithful to the film. While it gets major moments right – the chase through the Alps, Goldfinger’s factory, his stud ranch, turning Pussy Galore – the game changes so many details about how everything plays out that it feels like an alternate reality telling of the story. Anyone that has seen the movie before will likely become confused at the point where Tilly is alive and Bond leaves her to her own devices so he can snoop around on Goldfinger. That’s a major deviation and the game quickly compounds on that, over and over, until it’s doing its own thing, telling its own story its own way.

Which actually isn’t a bad thing when you think about it. If the game were a straight retelling of the movie then the player really wouldn’t have much to do most of the time. Bond isn’t exactly a passive agent in the film, working to try and foil Goldfinger more than a few times. It’s just that he’s at a disadvantage for much of the film, always under Auric’s thumb, frequently as his prisoner. While it worked for a film where the cat and mouse game could be played through character interaction and dialogue, it wouldn’t work as well in the context of a text adventure, so I can see why the developer, Raymond Benson, decided to wander off and do his own thing.

Besides, if you knew everything that was going to happen before it actually occurred that would have made for a pretty boring adventure, all things considered. Part of the fun of a text adventure is exploring the world and seeing what the writer has set up for you. Instant death lurks around every corner and your job was to navigate every trap, trick, and danger so you could find the one path through the game that worked. Knowing how it all would play out ahead of time would be boring since all that exploration and trial and error would be missing from the experience.

Of course, there is a ton of trial and error. Just getting through the initial car chase requires good timing as you wait for the right moments to push buttons in the armrest console of your car (assuming you looked around in the car, found the console, and weren’t shot when you ran out of time). After taking care of the bad guys you’d think have to figure out where to go which would require going back two zones, on foot (and not by car) to find the guardrail overlooking Auric’s factory, and then figuring out that you could pull one of the guide cables out from the rail, lowering it down so you could then scale safely into the factory. Even early on the solutions in the game are incredibly obtuse, and if you miss any one thing along the path it would spell doom for your agent afterwards.

That was, of course, just how these games played. They could be unforgiving even at the best of times, making you pay for any single mistake and sending you back to the beginning to try again. But this game was at least nice enough to provide nine save slots the player could use so that if they made good progress, and didn’t want to have to replay everything, they could save in a moment and grab a spot to continue from later. It was a small courtesy not every text adventure had, and it certainly made exploration and trial and error far kinder.

As far as text adventures go, this one is pretty solid. The writing is detailed and rich, with a lot of good moments written throughout the story. Some (well, okay, many) of the puzzles are obtuse, but once you figure out what the game wants it becomes a pretty smooth experience. Yes, there are plenty of times where you’ll die, but when you find the right path and are able to get through to the next set piece of the game, it all feels very satisfying. It’s the kind of text adventure that I could see people enjoying for a while as they parsed their way through the story.

The only downside of the game (at least for those that like text adventures) is that it is linear. Once you know the path through there’s nothing else to do except do it all the same way again. There aren’t multiple paths, nor are there alternate story modes so you can get a different experience each time. One time through the story of James Bond 007: Goldfinger is all you can get, and then the experience will never be fresh again. That might be par for the course in these kinds of games, but it does lessen the replayability of the game a lot.

Still, for the era and the story, this is a decent game. Anyone that likes text adventures, and enjoys a romping little title with lots of reading and typing, probably could enjoy this game. And hey, no Bond Girls were harmed in the making of this story.