0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Agent Armstrong

         

Agent Armstrong known as Agent Armstrong: Himitsu Shirei Daisakusen in Japan is a side scrolling action platformer, developed by King of the Jungle and published by Virgin Interactive for the Playstation 1 the game was released in Europe on the 18^th of September 1997 and three months later in Japan, the game also received a European release on PC in 1999, I have fond memories of this game the first ever copy of Offical UK Playstation Magazine i ever bought this game was on the demo disc.

In total there are 30 levels set all around the world, utilizing all the equipment at the Agency’s disposal, the game allows the player to tackle missions in many different orders, when the player enters the map room, the main hub where the player receives their missions, multiple map locations will be displayed, some of these missions paths will lead to the same conclusions while other may be diversions by Falconetti’s cronies, missions also include primary and secondary missions, the former is required to pass the mission, the secondary mission if completed Armstrong receives a medal of honour that is displayed on the mission map.

Player health is replenished by picking up health shaped pickups during the course of a level, if a players health if full it is best to ignore them and return should you need the health pickup, Ammo is found in crates and on the floor, there is also special ammo pickups which transform your machine gun into a super powered version for a temporary period of time, the player also has access to other weapons like grenades, mines, and bombs.

Spats Falconetti (excellent villain name) is the notorious godfather of the largest criminal organization in the world, the agency receives intelligence that Falconetti, is on the verge of taking over the world, they dispatch their top agent, Armstrong as their top secret and most potent weapon against Falconetti’s international crime network, travelling across the world and using the most state of the art weaponry and equipment in order to save the worlds people from the terrible fate of a Falconetti ruled world.

While review are not overly abundant there are sill some that have survived for the Playstation 1 version of the game with three of the review being very respectable one that is oddly low compared to other reviews, starting with the best though, with Absolute Playstation who gave the game an 80/100, with their review concluding.

Agent Armstrong is divided into thirty levels and amazingly each mission is dissimilar to the rest. However the gameplay remains the same throughout - running around shooting everyone, collecting power ups to sustain your life and completing each task before your health bar runs down. I found it a little difficult to successfully jump over hazards due to the ommision of shadowing which can be quite frustrating when you know it is not your fault. Overall a good arcade shooter in the Loaded mould.

German review publications Video Games and Mega Fun were both fairly positive in their reviews with the pair scoring the game a 78 and 76, onto the dismal score next from Computer And Video Games who awarded this game a 1/10 their review conclusion was as follows AA doesn't make a breakthrough or even establish itself as a standard, due to some niggly failings; graphical and gameplay. Graphically, the colourful and detailed appearance is let down by some thoughtless touches. The gameplay is marred by difficulties in judging the depth of the character in the playfield, and the inability to run and fire at the same time. Flawed but fun, seems stupidly low does that score but then again this is not the first time CVG’s name has appeared next to a low score.

Next we head to GameFAQs for their user data, a total of 11 users have rated Agent Armstrong, with an average rating of 3.41/5 the game received a positive reception from users with a lowest rating of 3/5, with most rating the game a 3.5/5 with a few 4/5 thrown in as well.

Difficulty wise over half of 7 users who rated the difficulty found it just right with a couple finding the game tough with one user finding the game on the easy side, lifespan wise we have 4 users who rated this with a decent spread from them, with one user each rating the game at 8 hours and 20 hours in length, with the remaining two users rated the games lifespan at 12 hours with the average lifespan of 13 hours.

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit five online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com,  eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, I will also be including Ebay.com as well

So lets get down to business with Gamedude, as well as eStarland.com don’t stock this game, no real surprise with this being a Europe and Japanese only release, surprisingly Retrogames.co.uk don’t stock the game either, so we move on to Amazon, the dot com version of Amazon only has one copy of the game available, this is a Japanese imported version of the game, it is a very good used copy and will set you back $350.49 this also comes with free shipping, this converts to £273.37 in the UK, in Euro region countries it will set you back €298.04 and in Papua New Guinea it will set you back 1112.54 Papua New Guinean Kina.

Moving over to the UK version of Amazon, where a handful of copies are on the market, most however have a missing component, the three cheapest copies are all disc only copies, these are priced between £7 and £12, the next copy on the market is mostly complete with the exception of the manual, this will set you back around £25 one shipping has been added in, the final copy on the market is in very good condition and once you have added in the shipping fee it will set you back a pricey £61.

Ebay.com has a few more copies on the market, once again however the shipping fees are once again painful, the minimum price for a complete copy of the game is around the $15 mark once you have added shipping costs in, this is the same cost for the free international shipping copy on sale these two are the only cost to value copies on sale with other copies having shipping fees of over 100% of the game price.

Written by

P J Gibbon