RoboCod (aka James Pond II: Codename RoboCod), is the sequel to the first James Pond game, with enhanced visuals and greater fun! It's one of the best platform games of its kind and was initially released for the Amiga, Atari ST / STE (in 1991) and later for a variety of platforms, including the Commodore 64, DOS (1993), Sega Game Gear (1993), Sega Mega Drive / Genesis (1991), Sega Master System (1993), Nintendo SNES, Nintendo GBA and PlayStation!
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY It's nearly two years since 1990, when the original "James Pond" was developed for the Amiga computers, scoring a massive 9 out of 10 in almost all major video game magazines of the time. The story begins with Dr Maybe (!) who's holding a toy factory to ransom in the North Pole (Santa's toy factory actually) with the intention to cause present-less Christmas for every child! The nasty doctor has been manufacturing a range of lethal playthings in an attempt to take revenge for his defeat in the previous game's story. And he will finally succeed unless James (our little fish-Bond hero) steps in! A high-tech RoboCop style suit enables Pond to expand his torso to preposterous heights! This comes in extremely handy during gameplay as very often you'll have to reach platforms and grip on them with your "fishy" fingers! During the game, you will find loads of power-ups. Hostile creatures lurk in these levels, and they come in many forms. There are no weapons in the game, so James must jump on them to kill them. The whole action takes place in rooms fully decorated with huge toys, candies and other kid stuff. Ok, the action is a stereotypical platform mayhem and basically all you have to do is to run, jump, squash, stretch (!) and generally splash your fins around, defeating baddies and killing massive bosses every two stages or so, in a joyful and very colorful wrap!
GRAPHICS / SOUND RoboCod is a beautiful game and the action is incredibly fast and smooth. The game's visuals look great, with nicely drawn backgrounds and animated sprites. Note that there are times where Pond can move in platforms with Sonic's (The Hedgehog) speeds!! The Amiga (OCS) version is a little faster and more responsive at times and there are a few more artistic touches compared to the PC and ST versions. Note that the Amiga AGA version is way better than any other 16bit machine as it uses advanced color techniques, more detailed visuals and faster gameplay! The sound is so cool and features several high quality in-game tunes (one of them is a RoboCop "spoof" tune) as well as a lot of sampled sound effects similar to the Amiga AGA.
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