Developed by Delphine Software and published by Interplay Productions in 1990.

I did this longplay at the request of a friend, so I'd never seen or heard of this game prior to doing the video.

Before Delphine went on to achieve international recognition with Another World and Flashback, it developed this point-and-click adventure game and was heavily influenced by Ian Fleming's famous creation, James Bond.

In fact, this game is also know as "James Bond - The Stealth Affair", where the player controls the famous spy. However, this version removes all references to Bond (possibly due to licensing issues), renaming the character to "John Glames" instead.

Although I had originally set out to record the James Bond version, a longplay for that version already exists. After playing Operation Stealth, I was surprised to find that this version made use of speech synthesis to provide voice overs in a very similar style to the games produced by Lankhor.

Regardless of which version you play, the story is identical. The hero must track down and prevent a madman from causing untold destruction using a prototype stealth bomber.

If you have ever played a point-and-click adventure, you know exactly how to play this. The game has an inventory system and multiple action choices; these need to be combined with objects and characters within each scene within the game in order to solve puzzles and to advance the plot.

As with many games in the genre, some of the puzzles are really obscure and require obsessive levels of pixel hunting with the mouse to find the correct object on screen. Coupled with several scenes requiring precision timing, the game can get frustrating at times.

Delphine decided to spice the game up with several arcade-style sections. Two of these involve escaping from mazes whilst avoiding hostile enemies; I appreciate that the developers were trying to make the game more exciting, but the artificial path-finding used by the enemies can be very frustrating and you will often get boxed into a corner with hostiles approaching from both directions and you sandwiched in the middle.

Technically, the game is on a par with other games in the genre for the time. The background art and sprites and well drawn and there are some catchy tunes that play during certain sections.

The synthesised speech is probably the most interesting thing about the game. This seemed reason enough to record this version of the game; speech synthesis seemed so amazingly cool in a time before proper voice acting in games. Sure, the pronunciation isn't perfect, and there are some translation issues where the dialogue reverts to French, but it really is just another example of how the Amiga was so far ahead of it's time.

*Update*
It seems that the synthesised speech was added into cracked versions of the game and wasn't part of the original program. Even so, it works quite well.

This is certainly the only game that I've played that has required me to "USE Elastic Band on Bomb".

Enjoy!
#retrogaming