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007 James Bond: The Stealth Affair (initially released in Europe as Operation Stealth) is a 1990 adventure video game developed by Delphine Software International and published by Interplay Entertainment. The game was released with the James Bond licence in North Americam[1] although this led to some inconsistencies as James Bond appeared to be taking his orders from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Plot[]

"As British super-agent James Bond, just back from holiday in Kuwait, you will find yourself plunged headlong into the world of international espionage, sent across the globe in an attempt to find the missing super-secret Stealth Bomber. The list of suspects include a Latin American dictator, the Russian KGB, and, possibly, organized crime. To be successful you'll need to sift through puzzling clues, track down a host of nefarious villains and untangle the threads of a worldwide conspiracy that threatens the safety of the globe (all the while dodging assassin's bullets, bombs and babes!)."
― Box blurb from the US variant, James Bond 007: The Stealth Affair.

James Bond (John Glames in Europe), a Central Intelligence Agency secret agent, has been assigned a mission to locate a newly designed high-tech F-19 type stealth plane in Latin America, which was stolen from NAS Miramar. Bond flies to Santa Paragua and upon discovering more favorable diplomatic conditions towards Germany, fabricates a German passport using a forging device hidden in his briefcase and passes through customs. Bond collects a telegram, prompting him to collect baggage containing a recording device disguised as an electric razor, instructing him to meet his contact at Las Mimosas Park. Bond takes a taxi downtown and meets with his contact, who is promptly murdered in a drive-by shooting – passing Bond a key to a safety deposit box with his dying breath. Opening the box at the city bank, 007 discovers an identical attaché case to his own and unlocks its trick compartment, discovering documents entitled “Operation Stealth” inside. He is jumped by two armed men - Colonel Karpov and Ostrovitch, his ‘contact’ from the park - who reveal that his real contact is dead and the ‘assassination’ was staged to gain access to his briefcase’s hidden contents. The Russians take him to a cave, bind him with rope and collapse the entrance with a bomb after leaving. Bond finds a pickaxe, cuts his bonds and escapes via an underwater tunnel.

Emerging in the city, he heads to his suite in the Manigua Excelsior Hotel, only to be held at gunpoint by a Julia Manigua, niece of the President and a resistance fighter belonging to the Movement for the Liberation of Santa Paragua, who has mistaken 007 for Otto. Otto confronts both with armed guards and takes them captive. During the dead of night he has both tied to rocks and thrown overboard his ship. After loosening his bonds with a bracelet, the pair narrowly escape to the surface and are rescued by Julia’s associate, Tonio. Bond teams up with the resistance, who seek to unmask an impostor posing as her uncle. With the president organizing a show at the Palace, they decide to infiltrate disguised as performers; hoping to locate the real President.

Cast[]

Gameplay[]

Originally released in Europe as Operation Stealth, the game was later upgraded and released in the US as an official 007 title named James Bond: The Stealth Affair. Both variants feature a point-and-click style of gameplay reminiscent of many of the LucasArts adventures of the time, as well as a number of more action-oriented elements including an overhead viewed maze section and a scene in which Bond attempts to escape from an underwater cavern before he runs out of oxygen. The Stealth Affair is most notable for its change of protagonists from John Glames to James Bond, but also featured gameplay alterations, with the number of tunnel/maze sections halved, the introduction of skippable cut-scenes, and dialog changes; fixing some of translation errors that were present in the original Operation Stealth.

The cracked Amiga version of the game featured a primitive synthesized voice that would perform all the dialogue in the game if 1MB or more RAM was installed. Unfortunately the crack featured a bug which meant that if the player attempted to click the mouse button in order to skip through the speech faster the game would freeze and have to be rebooted. For this reason many seasoned players would actually remove the memory expansion before playing the game for any extended period of time.

Reception[]

Computer Gaming World described the game as "somewhat of a disappointment". The magazine criticized the game's hidden object game-like interface and clumsy parser, and stated that the graphics and music were inferior to that of Future Wars, and that the central plot had little connection to the game's puzzles and arcade sequences.[1] Judith Kilbury-Cobb of the U.S. magazine .info gave the game four and a half stars and wrote, "The innovative interface is elegant in its simplicity and very easy to use. The stunning graphics are sharp, detailed, and complemented by first-rate sound and animation. No Bond fan should miss this one."[2]

Media[]

Images[]

Videos[]


Trivia[]

  • Despite alterations for the 007 licence, references to the character "John Glames" can still be found in dialogue.
  • Numerous in-joke references to the staff of Delphine Software exist within the game; such as baggage name-tags in the names of staff members and an old man in a Sombrero "living the dream of all the Delphine team: sleeping.. sleeping.. sleeping".

References[]

  1. 1.0 1.1 Greenberg, Allen L.. "Taking Stock on Bond", Computer Gaming World, April 1991, pp. 38. Retrieved on 17 November 2013. 
  2. Kilbury-Cobb, Judith (March 1991). James Bond: The Stealth Affair. .info.

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