#44: James Pond 2: Codename Robocod (Millennium, Amiga, 1991)

Christmas is a subject that’s fairly unavoidable when discussing James Pond 2: Codename Robocod, a game that is absolutely drenched in its trappings. First and foremost, the plot revolves around the villain, Dr. Maybe, stealing all the toys from Santa’s workshop, which also serves as the game’s setting. But it goes deeper than that. There’s the forced cheerfulness of the fixed grins on the faces of its characters and the relentlessly upbeat music that never, ever goes away. There’s not one but two puns of exactly the caliber you might expect to find in a Christmas cracker joke right there in the name. And there’s even a bit of crass commercialism in the form of the introductory cutscene which devolves, without warning, into an advert for a particular brand of chocolate biscuit.

James Pond 2 plays out as a fairly standard platformer with heavy inspiration from Super Mario Bros., with one exception; the suit that gives Pond his codename which allows him to vertically extend his torso… pretty much indefinitely and grip hold of any ceiling that he meets through this extension. Perhaps an interesting and unique game could be made that took this mechanic and ran with it, but whatever it may be, James Pond 2 is not that game. Past the early stages, there are very few levels that make any actual use of the gimmick, as if the designers got bored with it and wanted to move onto something new. Which, to be fair, they do; one could not describe this game as lacking in variety. No, it flits between ideas at a rather rapid rate, like a kid on Christmas morning jumping from one new toy to another. One moment you are bouncing around a level made of jelly where the screen is, for no particular reason, upside down, the next you are donning a shower cap and piloting a flying bathtub through a world of soap suds and rubber ducks.