I am continuing with the rather futile task of playing all the video games.

I've been a little busy this week taking part in a thoroughly enjoyable puzzle hunt. My team still has 2 more puzzles to solve, but these games aren't going to play themselves, so I took a few hours break this afternoon to play through 007: Licence to Kill on the ZX Spectrum. Or, more aptly, I should probably say that I took a few hours break to figure out how to connect a spectrum to a modern telly, find a working cassette player, a suitable power converter - and figure out how to load games from cassettes onto the console. I then spent about 30 minutes playing the game - stopped for a break, realised that in the process of loading the game, I'd broken the "play" button on the cassette, and so had no way of reloading the game! Still, I think I saw the majority of it...

Game 000005: 007: Licence to Kill

Licence to Kill was a video game developed by Quixel and released on a variety of cassette based home computers in 1989. I played through the spectrum version of the game - but the differences between the versions seem only to be cosmetic.

My time with this game was relatively short, and I only managed to see four of the six levels before the difficulties of relying on decades old technology caught up with me. The game took about 2 minutes to load, but once it was stored in memory the transitions from level to level were practically instantaneous.

Level one begins with Bond flying a helicopter, dodging some incredibly accurate anti-aircraft guns and chasing down "the evil drug smuggler Sanchez". Not that you'd know any of that by playing the game - as the story, controls and level objectives are only found in the games instruction booklet /cassette case insert, (so much for in-game tutorials!) This proved an issue several times during the game, as I couldn't work out how to pause. So upon starting a new level I would inevitably die within the first few seconds while looking up the controls, lose all three lives and have to restart the game from scratch.

Perhaps the most interesting level was the second, which had you infiltrate an enemy base on foot while shooting down Sanchez's henchmen. Conserving ammo was essential here, which was a challenge due to the game's confusing controls. (Hold down the fire button and the direction keys are no longer used for walking, but instead for aiming.) Being forced to duck in and out of cover gave this mission some depth that the other stages seemed to be lacking.

Having very little familiarity with games from this era I feel ill equipped to pass any judgment of this game relative to its peers. It was nice to see that each level had essentially been coded from scratch, and introduced a new game-play mechanic - but some of these were more entertaining that others, and after my half an hour stint with this game I felt no incentive to return to it. Messing around with this older hardware however, was a lot of fun. I'm certainly looking forward to to playing through some more Spectrum games in the future, (I recently acquired a box of about 100 of them from some guy who was going to throw them out!)

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In other news, my copy of 007: Everything or Nothing finally arrived this week - so I look forward to playing through that over the next week. For now however, back to the puzzles...