James Bond 007: A View to a Kill

Attempting to play this game, which can be found via abandonware sites to an extent, is pretty rough even for those with experience in dealing with some of the particular quirks natural language parsing posed for companies in the 80s. As the other review noted, EXAMINE ... CAREFULLY is an incredibly important command, but also seemingly custom commands (like FLIP) are somewhat lost to time given the manuals are mostly unavailable, and the dialogue is difficult to interact with.

The game is so short that you can easily end up at the end of the game without two important items, replay the game, get the items, and finish it all within a single sitting if you knew what you were doing. Even without a walkthrough and with several playthroughs and parsing issues it only took me around 3 hours to complete rather lackadaisically. With a walkthrough it would take minutes. There are six relatively small locations in total.

The ending is also really unimpressive considering the film ends with a battle atop the Golden Gate Bridge. I won't give anything away, but rest assured the ending here is hardly as dramatic. The only reason I bumped it from one to two stars is that there are a few halfway decent puzzles in there. If the parser wasn't so difficult to reason with it might have even been a three.

I got this game for my Mac 512k back in the day but never managed to finish it until now. Its crude parser and lack of description make it difficult, not because the puzzles are particularly good. Unless you read the manuals CAREFULLY (it uses EXAMINE CAREFULLY as a kind of puzzle *rolls eyes*) you'll miss some of the solutions, which you would not get normally (FLIP is for people, not switches).

The story isn't well told in the game at all, so if you're interested in the absurdly bad plot then I suggest you watch the movie. This one killed the James Bond flicks for me, as up to that point it was the worst one I'd ever seen. Who knew it could get worse?

There is a funny joke at the end of this game if you don't defuse the bomb before kissing the girl. It scolds you by saying, "Sean, George, or Roger wouldn't have done that!" It's the only thing amusing about it.