James Pond: Underwater Agent - Sega Genesis

Do you love James Bond, the suave secret agent who has a way with guns and women? Do you love goldfish? If so, this game is for you.

James Pond is a spy-fish, who wears a tuxedo and swims around completing top-secret missions (how...clever). He's an ugly little guy too. He looks almost like a real goldfish, with those puckered lips and beady eyes.

This fish has the worst arsenal of any secret agent I've ever seen. His only hope, against the armies of aquatic evildoers, is his deadly stream of bubbles. Not a gun, but bubbles. The idea is that you're supposed to trap your foes in a bubble, then touch the bubble to obliterate them.

While this works at first, the later levels throw dozens of respawning baddies at you at once, and they're fast. You can swim anywhere you want, but that's hardly fun when you just know that in the screen above you, you're about to be assaulted by eels and sharks from every direction. And no matter how well you play, you can only store up to four lives, which disappear quickly.

The game also fails on the general “fun” level. There's really no story. Every level, you're given some kind of mission. At first glance, they all sound different. You get to do awesome stuff like freeing lobsters from their cages and cleaning up hazardous waste barrels. This is actually just a collect-a-thon. Basically, you just look for something, and pick it up. Sometimes, you'll look for a key or a pearl, then take that item to a fish or a mermaid. Then you have the pleasure of escorting that character to safety.

Your mission: seal the leaking sewage pipe.

This is the entire game. It sounds so easy, but it's not. To make matters worse, the water you're swimming in changes colors every level, and it looks bad. On very rare occasions, the water is blue, but more often, it's brown or green or black. Why is the water a disgusting brown color? Do you even want to know?

I've never been able to beat this atrocious game, and I'm ashamed to say I've tried. I usually get to this level where some ghost fish is chasing James Pond around everywhere. Every time the ghost touches him, he takes damage. The fish can go through walls, and James Pond can't. So often, he'll end up cornered, unable to escape or do anything but die.

Basically, if you want to be a secret agent, stay on dry land. Then you won't have to suffer through this shipwreck. All this game really does is make me hungry for some lobster.