005 (pronounced double "O" five), is an early Sega arcade game based around a pseudo James Bond theme. Instead of secret agent 007 you get to play secret agent 005 (which allowed Sega to save money by not licensing the "James Bond" character for this game).

You play secret agent 005, your mission is to take a briefcase filled with secret documents to a waiting helicopter. But, enemy agents are everywhere, trying to thwart your every move, luckily you are armed with cannisters of gas (I would have brought a gun myself, but hey, to each his own).

This game has been mostly forgotten, because it simply isn't very good. But here is how it goes. You move your little agent man on a screen with eight buildings, many guards roam this screen, so you have to duck into one of the buildings almost immediately. Inside each building is a little mini-maze of sorts. Just avoid the guards inside (there will only be a couple of them), or stun them with gas canisters, and make for the exit. When you come outside again, you will have to route yourself through yet another building, repeating the same basic idea of find the exit. Eventually you will get to hop into your little helicopter at the top of the screen (which of course starts the whole thing over again).

This title suffers from a severe case of bad graphics, or perhaps it is just poorly aged graphics. The game was released in 1982, and tried to pack far too many details into its small color palette. These types of graphics do not age well, more modern graphics quickly make them look old. Set your desktop to 16 colors to see what I mean, looks horrible, but go use Windows 3.1 with 16 colors, and it looks fine. You have to design your graphics for the machines color capabilities, this game didn't really do that. While other games like Ms. Pac-Man simply tried to have nice attractive graphics, with little thought for detail, which ages much better.

This game came in a generic Sega wood grain panel cabinet (sticker sideart was optional). These were technically all dedicated cabinets, although the lack of any painted art makes the machines easy to switch and still retain originality (a lot of early Sega titles came in this same cabinet). The game boards themselves were Sega System G80 compatible (as were several other Sega titles before Zaxxon), and will work in any G80 cabinet. The games Astro Blaster, Monster Bash, and Space Odyssey ran on identical hardware, and this title can be converted to any of those by swapping out the program EPROMs on the main board.

The controls consist of a single 4-Way Joystick, and one button. The monitor is mounted vertically, as were most early Sega titles. The monitor bezel sported the standard game instructions and the marquee showed a "005" logo and a shining flashlight(the logo is in a font that reminds me of high school football numbers). "005" is very rare today, as most of them were converted to other titles long ago.

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