Bond’s Nephew Hits the Big Time

Well, if you thought the NES version of James Bond Jr. was bad, the SNES game is so much worse. At least the NES game tried. But then, even just covering James Bond Jr. feels like scraping the bottom of the barrel. Technically it’s an officially licensed media in that United Artists held the rights to adapt the world’s most famous secret agent into movies and, apparently, television, and they gave those rights over to Murakami-Wolf-Swenson to create a kid-friendly television series. The result, James Bond Jr. was about as bad as could be expected.

Lasting exactly one season in 1991, spanning 65 episodes, James Bond Jr. wasn’t exactly a hit. It came and went with little fanfare, and unless you were alive at the time, or happened to end up with one of the character’s games in your collection, you probably don’t even remember that Junior existed at all. Hell, the games didn’t even come out when the television series was still on the air, getting released by THQ in 1992 when, one has to assume, they expected the series to get a second season. It didn’t, and the games were quickly shuffled out to die quick, painful deaths before everyone moved on.

And I get it, the company bet big on the series, expecting great things. But when it didn’t pay off, the games had to get completed as quickly as they could to meet deadlines, even though everyone involved had to know they wouldn’t sell well. Eurocom at least put in effort on the NES game, and while it wasn’t good I at least respected what the company tried to do. Gray Matter made the SNES game and, unlike that NES effort, this absolutely feels like a work-for-hire job that they tried to get through as quickly as they could. It’s bad, in that unique way 1990s shovelware was bad, and playing it now it’s hard to think of any other time this game could have come out than 1992.

In the game Junior is called on to battle the forces of S.C.U.M. He and his associates (really just IQ, his tech friend) have to get ready for battle as Junior is called on to platform and shoot his way across six main stages. All of this so he can save the world and… okay, really, the plot doesn’t matter because the game barely invests in it and, as a player, you’re just trying to skip past the boring text as fast as you can. Junior has to work through stages until you get to the end, sometimes fight a boss, and then repeat again a few more times before the game blessedly ends.

Let’s be clear, nothing about this game works. The SNES title is a mix of vehicle shooting sections and platforming areas, and both sides are as tedious as they come. There’s nothing fun or interesting in any section of the game, with the stages both being too basic to be interesting but also too long to at least have the sense to get on with things. And even if you can play through the game well, at forty minutes long the whole experience feels interminable despite a game of that length also being a total rip-off at full price.

The vehicle sections are very repetitive. You have two different vehicles you drive, either a helicopter/plane (technically two different vehicles but they control exactly the same in their respective stages) and a boat. The helicopter comes with a forward firing gun as well as a bomb it drops at an angle. Your job is to fly across the scrolling stage, taking out air and land targets while collecting shields to stay alive. Fend off enough enemies to get to the end, fight a boss that barely does anything, and then you get to move to the next stage. The boat sections, while being top down, are more or less similar. You’re boating around with a forward firing gun, as well as ice bombs, and you have to dodge or kill enemies, avoid mines, and hop ramps until you get to the end.

None of the vehicle sections are interesting, and all of them easily go on far longer than you’d like. I’d say the boat sections are better if only because they’re more active and there’s more to balance between attacking, dodging, and ramping. I still didn’t really enjoy the one boat section of the game, but I felt less bored with this stage than I did in either of the flying sections. ANd bear in mind these vehicles sections are the best part of the game because what comes in between, the platforming, is far, far worse.

James Bond Jr.’s platforming sections are awful. When I say they’re uniquely 1990s, that’s because they’re all horribly laid out maze-type stages that meander with no rhyme or reason, sprawling along while enemies and traps are hidden just out of view, waiting for you to fall prey to them. They aren’t really unfair if only because this is a game that was meant for little kids and the difficulty is turned way down, but at the same time they aren’t fun. Once you’ve played one game with these kinds of maze-type stages, you’ve basically seen them all. They gain length from being long and meandering, but they don’t really have anything fun going on in them.

They’re also most of the game. You’re running around, shooting enemies or throwing bombs at them, while you try to puzzle out where to go or what to do. By the end of the first of these stages I was already checked out. And then I had to play two more of them, each as boring and poorly designed as the last. I really hate that in the 1990s every company with a license thought they could shit out a ton of games just by making long, sprawling, maze levels over and over again (see also: RoboCop versus the Terminator and Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin). They all sucked, and every time I have to dive back into 1990s video games I dread which one will be an awful maze-type experience to suffer through. James Bond Jr. is just one of a great many.

Even the game itself is ugly. If you try to set aside the bad gameplay and appreciate any artistry to the title, you realize there’s none to be had. The graphics are all sloppily designed and very bland. Characters don’t move realistically even within the context of the television shows this is based on. Everything is painfully basic, with minimal effort put into the presentation. Along with that, the sound design is awful, with poorly written music that loops too fast along with jarring, screechy sound effects. This game is not pleasant to experience from any angle.

And that’s really it. The SNES game didn’t have any of the creativity of its NES counterpart, failing to add anything new or interesting into the mix. The NES game at least flirted with Metroidvania gameplay, even if it didn’t do it very well, but the SNES title is as bland and generic as it comes. Hell, remove the few still-frame cut-scenes that use characters from the television series and you’d be hard pressed to even know this was a James Bond Jr. game at all. It’s just a generic platform shooter with a license slapped on time, lazy and sloppy as it comes. While I could at least see people going back to see what the NES game was all about, the SNES game is a total waste of time, a low-effort licensed game designed to steal money from kids without providing anything for their cash. It’s best left forgotten, just like the cartoon it was based on.