James Pond 2: Robocod Longplay (Game Gear) [60 FPS]
46Developed by Vectordean and published by U.S. Gold in 1993..
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Al82_Retro
Add me on Google+: http://bit.ly/1tPwL1u
Continuing my series on James Pond 2 longplays, I decided to check out the Game Gear version. I still own the actual cartridge for this and I remember being mightily impressed when I played it back in the day, but how does it stand up under the scrutiny of a much more critical eye over twenty years later?
The answer to this question is "extremely well". Since James Pond 2 was originally designed for 16-bit platforms, trying to port a fast-moving platform game with detailed graphics and rich colours to 8-bit systems with inferior hardware and limited graphics capabilities seemed like a recipe for disaster. However, the Game Gear/Master System versions are incredibly close to their 16-bit counter-parts in terms of gameplay and aesthetics.
James Pond 2 was a pretty big game, so it doesn't surprise me to find that some of the levels from this version have been removed. Even so, there's still a lot of content here and the developers managed to keep just about all of the actual level content and art assets completely in tact. I was expecting to find things like bonus levels and hidden stages cut from the game, but I was proved wrong - every secret location I'd been able to find in the 16-bit versions were present here.
For an 8-bit title, the graphics are simply excellent. The main James Pond sprite looks as good in this version as any other and all the frames of animation seem to be present. The attention to detail is largely consistent across the board with only a few enemies (such as the steam trains) being redesigned to work on the mobile format.
The speed at which the game runs is also extremely impressive. There's rarely any slow-down, except for when multiple enemies appear on-screen simultaneously. Even then, this version actually performs better than the SNES version, which suffers from optimisation problems more frequently.
The one main problem with the Game Gear version is the system's limited screen resolution. At 160 x 144 pixels this means that the visible play area is very small and it doesn't seem as though any of the art assets were resized (although it would probably have looked terrible if they had been). This means that it's sometimes very difficult to react to enemies when they appear, as well as making navigation of some levels difficult. I think that the developers did tweak the camera to try and compensate for the smaller field of view and it's probably as good as it could be, but it can be problematic at times.
The one other problem I noticed was that the collision detection between James and enemy sprites isn't quite as precise as it should be. I found that I'd lost health when landing on enemies from certain angles that would normally be considered a hit on other versions of the game.
Fortunately, these niggles don't detract too much from what is, in all other regards, an excellent conversion of a game that, as far as I'm concerned, has no right to look or plays as well as it does on this system.
#retrogaming