James Pond: Underwater Agent is a platform video game released in 1990. The name of the game is actually a parody from the famous James Bond 007 secret agent! James Pond has a lot going for it with its cute graphics, funny sounds, addictive gameplay and endless fun with a great sense of humor! James Pond was released for the Commodore Amiga OCS, Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes and Sega Mega Drive systems.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY James, this little fish character, was quite popular back in the 90s and was even featured in some comic books! The game was successful enough to spawn two more sequels and one spin-off. In James Pond: Underwater Agent you play the role of a secret oceanic agent, an intelligent, mutated anthropomorphic fish, hired by the British Secret Service to protect the seas and take out the bad guys of the underwater areas. You mainly have to set some innocent aquatic creatures free, solve puzzles, defeat enemies and find items to perform specific tasks such as keys to open the cages or sponges to bung up the holes on leaking oil tankers. James can also fire bubbles towards his enemies to trap them and finally pop them to kill. There are 12 different missions, each named after some James Bond movies! Each mission information is displayed right before you begin your quest. James Pond has a lot going for it with its colorful presentation and its great sense of humor!
GRAPHICS / SOUND The Amiga version features cute, colorful and well drawn graphics that look better and run smoother than the ST and Acorn versions. There is a wide variety of sprites that move smoothly on your screen! The game's sound on the Amiga is very appealing, with a nice introductory theme, a few humorous sound effects and some nicely composed a la 007 in-game tunes.
GAMEPLAY SAMPLE VIDEO On our video below you may watch the Atari ST, Amiga OCS and Sega Mega Drive versions of the game.
The Amiga version is at 04:48.
CPU: Motorola MC68000 7.16 MHz MEMORY: 512KB of Chip RAM (OCS chipset - A500), 512 KB of Slow RAM or Trapdoor RAM can be added via the trapdoor expansion, up to 8 MB of Fast RAM or a Hard drive can be added via the side expansion slot. The ECS chipset (A500+) offered 1MB on board to 2MB (extended) of Chip RAM. GRAPHICS: The OCS chipset (Amiga 500) features planar graphics (codename Denise custom chip), with up to 5 bit-planes (4 in hires), allowing 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 color screens, from a 12bit RGB palette of 4096 colors. Resolutions varied from 320x256 (PAL, non-interlaced, up to 4096 colors) to 640x512 (interlace, up to 4 colors). Two special graphics modes where also included: Extra Half Bright with 64 colors and HAM with all 4096 colors on-screen. The ECS chipset models (Amiga 500+) offered same features but also extra high resolution screens up to 1280x512 pixels (4 colors at once). SOUND: (Paula) 4 hardware-mixed channels of 8-bit sound at up to 28 kHz. The hardware channels had independent volumes (65 levels) and sampling rates, and mixed down to two fully left and fully right stereo outputs