Super James Pond (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of American Softwork's 1993 platform game for the Super NES, Super James Pond.

Super James Pond is a port of the popular 1991 Amiga Christmas-themed platformer, James Pond 2: Robocod. It's a direct continuation of the original game: after Dr. Maybe escapes in the ending of James Pond, he heads to the North Pole and takes over Santa's workshop and turns the elves into monsters and penguins (which lends itself conveniently to the candy adverts in the game). James has to save Santa, save the workshop, and reclaim all of the stolen toys to save the holiday for children the world over.

If you've read up to this point, you've probably noticed the ridiculous names. The game seems to have quite the action movie fetish. It goes so far as to even remix the Robocop theme for the title screen to match the RoboCod suit that James wears. This suit allows his fish body to stretch vertically to grab onto high ceilings, making him some sort of aquatic, bipedal cyborg that mimics Stretch Armstrong. The setup is ridiculous, but it's a pretty novel mechanic that allows for some very open level designs.

It looks, sounds, and feels like an Amiga game for sure. Everything bleeds with color and the enemies are pretty creative in their design, and the music is fairly catchy with some fun Christmas tune remixes tossed in. The gameplay is quite fast and the controls are touchy, but the difficulty level is pretty forgiving, and the stage design takes a lot of cues from other computer platformers with large, open levels filled with secret passages and items. I'm a big fan of the vehicles, too - the flying bathtub is a personal favorite.

James Pond has never really gotten much recognition in the US despite being quite popular in England (I'd guess that that's something to do with how much more popular 8 and 16 bit computers were than consoles in the early 90s in the UK), and while he never could quite match Nintendo and Sega's action game stars, this fluorescent orange fish did have some very worthwhile games.

I've not seen much love given to the SNES version of the game at all, so I figured that Christmastime would be the perfect opportunity to drop this playthrough.

Happy holidays!
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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