Zelda looks, super spy left-hooks.
Forget an exploding pen: all you needed were a few spare batteries to enjoy this forgotten gem of the early handheld era. Goldeneye may be the more fondly-remembered 90s outing for the super spy, but James Bond 007 on the Game Boy went to places that no Bond game has ventured to since. Developed by Sapphire Corporation and published in 1998, a year after Goldeneye 64 had taken the first person shooter genre by storm, the Game Boy’s take on the James Bond franchise was one of the more ambitious takes on the character we’ve seen so far. Top-down Zelda gameplay meets pun-laden super spy antics? You betcha. The fact that so few people remember it feels like a conspiracy that only Blofield himself could mastermind. If possible, cast your mind back to the licensed 8-bit and 16-bit games of the 1990s. While Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Jedi: Fallen Order are now big-budget, hugely ambitious takes on existing franchises, the potential was much smaller in the 90s. Slap a recognizable character and logo on the box, make a crude approximation of said character out of a handful of pixels, make a side scrolling platformer – job’s a good’un. This describes the vast majority of tie-ins at the time. Sapphire Corporation, based out of American Fork, Utah, had other ideas though. Working to the strengths of the platform it had been saddled with, James Bond 007 was instead a Zelda-like, top-down adventure where exploration and clue gathering was as important as sharp shooting and fisticuffs. Like in Link’s Awakening, you could map items to the A and B buttons as you saw fit, exploring locations for secrets and solutions to puzzles, as well as taking the fight to mobs of henchmen.
