007 James Bond: The Stealth Affair, also known as Operation Stealth in Europe, is an adventure game from Delphine Software International, released in 1990. The game is mainly the work of Paul Cuisset (programming) and Jean Baudlot (sound). The game was released with the Bond license in the United States, although this led to some inconsistencies as the MI6 agent appeared to be taking his orders from the CIA. The Stealth Affair mainly features a point-and-click style of gameplay reminiscent of many of the LucasArts adventures of the time, as well as a number of more action-oriented elements including an overhead viewed maze section and a scene in which Glames/Bond attempts to escape from an underwater cavern before he runs out of oxygen. The cracked Amiga version of the game featured a primitive synthesized voice that would perform all the dialogue in the game if 1MB or more RAM was installed. Unfortunately the crack featured a bug which meant that if the player attempted to click the mouse button in order to skip through the speech faster the game would freeze and have to be rebooted. For this reason many seasoned players would actually remove the memory expansion before playing the game for any extended period of time.
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A crappy point and click adventure that had the James Bond license slapped onto it last minute when it was released in the US.
This game first came out in the UK, where is was not a James Bond game. Here it was “Operation Stealth”, a point and click adventure starring a 007 rip-off John Glames. When Interplay released the game in the US, they applied for a James Bond license, renaming the main character and adding a bit of text explaining that Bond is “on loan” to the CIA.
This is a point and click adventure – but what I call the “bad kind”. A good point and click adventure, to me, is one where no matter where you are in the game, you have access to the required locations that have what you need to proceed. A bad one has objects you can miss and be stuck much later (after having saved your game), and the worst will make needed objects simply difficult to see.
The Stealth Affair sets its tone fairly early on. You arrive with an airport with a briefcase and a passport, and a guard asks for your passport. If you show your passport…game over. Visitors from America make for great hostages and you get captured. You need to find out what country is liked and then create a fake passport.
There’s a newspaper stand in the area, you have no coins but luckily if you examine the coin return you’ll find one. Then you can buy a paper and reveal the country (it’s randomised from a small selection). You then have to use your briefcase and “operate” the briefcase to open it, use a calculator to get to a hidden compartment and then create your passport.
The next section is mostly about getting coins to buy a flower as a sign for your rendezvous. You go to a bank, swap coins, get the flower sit down, follow instructions and you’ll eventually get captured. This section is really just a lot of back and forth as the puzzles change from obscure to not really having any puzzles at all.
You end up getting captured by the villain’s henchmen who, in typical Bond fashion, tie you up and trap you into a cave, blowing the entrance, instead of just shooting him. One thing to note is that Bond never has access to a gun in this game, although he does punch two people throughout it. This cave section highlights another one of the game’s problems: the “USE” and “OPERATE” commands. In the cave you find a pickaxe and breeze coming through the wall, but if you use the pickaxe on the wall, it does nothing. You need to stand in the perfect spot and “OPERATE” the pickaxe a few times.
This leads to the first action sequence: here you dive through water with limited air. The controls are atrocious, and Bond sticks to rocks extremely easily. Action scenes in adventure games are a nice idea, but they really need to be enjoyable.
After this you need to investigate a hotel room, although make sure you go out of your way and talk to a crazy person on the beach selling the next big thing. You’ll need that later on. Investigating the hotel, where you’ll end up getting captured again.
This is where the game sneaks in the first time you have to do an action in the middle of a cutscene. All the shortcut buttons for the different actions skip dialogue, so you have to use the right click menu, but during most of the cutscene, right click does nothing. You have to right click at the right point and operate the object you used earlier.
You then get thrown into the sea and have to escape, this is a moment where you have to perform the actions immediately or you’ll die – there’s no room to think or misclick on anything.
Bond then infiltrates the enemy base as part of a magic show, then sneaks off in a disappearing act. Time for another action sequence.
We have a top down maze. Guards move around, but can’t go through the revolving doors, which Bond can move. They are incredibly tedious and the guard’s patterns are random. You need to find a key and then the exit. After completing this, you have to do another. Operation Stealth had four mazes in total, but two were removed for the Bond version, although one is too many.
Then you get to investigate the boss’s office, one of the best parts of the game. Here you have everything you need to investigate, you need to find a hidden safe and use your codebreaker to help you find the code. You feel like a spy in this moment. You then get ambushed and have to play a dreadful jetski minigame until M and Q pop up in a submarine to tell you that the villain, Dr. Why, has threatened to nuke multiple cities if the government don’t give them more plutonium than they have access to.
Bond swims to Why’s secret underwater base and gets captured again, he manages to break free and gets a disguise (before going through some more terrible mazes, this time filled with giant killer rats and you can only see a small area around Bond). Before entering the final room, you’ll need to create a distraction then enter the final room, with the final confrontation with Dr. Why where you have to perform the right actions at the perfect time. The day is saved, buy Dr. Why has escaped, taking the captured Bond girl with him.
In this final confrontation, you only have to do two things. But unless you’re reading a guide, you’ll likely never be able to figure it out.
One of the items is an inflatable raft. In the final secret base, there’s what looks like just a panel for a machine, but when you hover over it, it says its a garbage disposal, the raft is hidden there. While this is annoying and difficult to spot, it’s at least something you might encounter and split off. The other item you need is impossibly obscure. It can be found during the swimming section before the final base.
If you swim the wrong direction, you’ll come across a screen with a few pieces of seaweed. You can play the game without ever seeing this screen, and you have no reason to fully explore before going on. You may examine one bit of seaweed and it will just state that it’s seaweed. If you examine the correct one, it will mention something stuck in it. However, even then the object you need doesn’t have anything when you hover over it, so you need to keep clicking around that spot for the right pixel to activate picking up the most vital object in the game: an elastic band.
Once you finish, Bond has a big reward ceremony where the leader of the country declares a national holiday in celebration of the super secret spy.
The Stealth Affair has some nice moments, but frustrating gameplay. The dialogue is great in some parts, but other parts haven’t been altered from when the game was parodying Bond. The graphics and sound are very nice, along with the animation, so the presentation is pretty good all round.
This is a point and click adventure – but what I call the “bad kind”. A good point and click adventure, to me, is one where no matter where you are in the game, you have access to the required locations that have what you need to proceed. A bad one has objects you can miss and be stuck much later (after having saved your game), and the worst will make needed objects simply difficult to see.
The Stealth Affair sets its tone fairly early on. You arrive with an airport with a briefcase and a passport, and a guard asks for your passport. If you show your passport…game over. Visitors from America make for great hostages and you get captured. You need to find out what country is liked and then create a fake passport.
There’s a newspaper stand in the area, you have no coins but luckily if you examine the coin return you’ll find one. Then you can buy a paper and reveal the country (it’s randomised from a small selection). You then have to use your briefcase and “operate” the briefcase to open it, use a calculator to get to a hidden compartment and then create your passport.
The next section is mostly about getting coins to buy a flower as a sign for your rendezvous. You go to a bank, swap coins, get the flower sit down, follow instructions and you’ll eventually get captured. This section is really just a lot of back and forth as the puzzles change from obscure to not really having any puzzles at all.
You end up getting captured by the villain’s henchmen who, in typical Bond fashion, tie you up and trap you into a cave, blowing the entrance, instead of just shooting him. One thing to note is that Bond never has access to a gun in this game, although he does punch two people throughout it. This cave section highlights another one of the game’s problems: the “USE” and “OPERATE” commands. In the cave you find a pickaxe and breeze coming through the wall, but if you use the pickaxe on the wall, it does nothing. You need to stand in the perfect spot and “OPERATE” the pickaxe a few times.
This leads to the first action sequence: here you dive through water with limited air. The controls are atrocious, and Bond sticks to rocks extremely easily. Action scenes in adventure games are a nice idea, but they really need to be enjoyable.
After this you need to investigate a hotel room, although make sure you go out of your way and talk to a crazy person on the beach selling the next big thing. You’ll need that later on. Investigating the hotel, where you’ll end up getting captured again.
This is where the game sneaks in the first time you have to do an action in the middle of a cutscene. All the shortcut buttons for the different actions skip dialogue, so you have to use the right click menu, but during most of the cutscene, right click does nothing. You have to right click at the right point and operate the object you used earlier.
You then get thrown into the sea and have to escape, this is a moment where you have to perform the actions immediately or you’ll die – there’s no room to think or misclick on anything.
Bond then infiltrates the enemy base as part of a magic show, then sneaks off in a disappearing act. Time for another action sequence.
We have a top down maze. Guards move around, but can’t go through the revolving doors, which Bond can move. They are incredibly tedious and the guard’s patterns are random. You need to find a key and then the exit. After completing this, you have to do another. Operation Stealth had four mazes in total, but two were removed for the Bond version, although one is too many.
Then you get to investigate the boss’s office, one of the best parts of the game. Here you have everything you need to investigate, you need to find a hidden safe and use your codebreaker to help you find the code. You feel like a spy in this moment. You then get ambushed and have to play a dreadful jetski minigame until M and Q pop up in a submarine to tell you that the villain, Dr. Why, has threatened to nuke multiple cities if the government don’t give them more plutonium than they have access to.
Bond swims to Why’s secret underwater base and gets captured again, he manages to break free and gets a disguise (before going through some more terrible mazes, this time filled with giant killer rats and you can only see a small area around Bond). Before entering the final room, you’ll need to create a distraction then enter the final room, with the final confrontation with Dr. Why where you have to perform the right actions at the perfect time. The day is saved, buy Dr. Why has escaped, taking the captured Bond girl with him.
In this final confrontation, you only have to do two things. But unless you’re reading a guide, you’ll likely never be able to figure it out.
One of the items is an inflatable raft. In the final secret base, there’s what looks like just a panel for a machine, but when you hover over it, it says its a garbage disposal, the raft is hidden there. While this is annoying and difficult to spot, it’s at least something you might encounter and split off. The other item you need is impossibly obscure. It can be found during the swimming section before the final base.
If you swim the wrong direction, you’ll come across a screen with a few pieces of seaweed. You can play the game without ever seeing this screen, and you have no reason to fully explore before going on. You may examine one bit of seaweed and it will just state that it’s seaweed. If you examine the correct one, it will mention something stuck in it. However, even then the object you need doesn’t have anything when you hover over it, so you need to keep clicking around that spot for the right pixel to activate picking up the most vital object in the game: an elastic band.
Once you finish, Bond has a big reward ceremony where the leader of the country declares a national holiday in celebration of the super secret spy.
The Stealth Affair has some nice moments, but frustrating gameplay. The dialogue is great in some parts, but other parts haven’t been altered from when the game was parodying Bond. The graphics and sound are very nice, along with the animation, so the presentation is pretty good all round.