GamesRelay

Name: Impossible Mission

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to infiltrate the headquarters of Professor Elvin Atombender located in his Secret Island bunker. The Professor is under suspicion for hacking into The National Security computers and has six nuclear weapons pointed at various strategic points around the globe. Once inside his HQ you must use the elevator system to make your way around the base and discover the password which will allow you to stop the Professor by disabling his missiles. The rooms in the secret HQ are all guarded by robots that'll do their upmost to stop you from completing your mission, these robots move on random paths and will react differently depending in the situation; you must study these and act accordingly. You have eight hours to complete your mission.

And therein lies the premise of Impossible Mission, its an old school platform game which sees you take the part of a spy with eight hours to save the world, classic stuff! Not suprising since the game itself has been around since the days of the Commodore 64, released way back in 1984 by Epyx software; since then it's seen various incarnations on various computers and consoles although this is the first version of the game since 1988 when it was released on the Sega Master System.

You make your way around the underground HQ via a series of lifts, these lifts connect to different rooms which you must explore. Each room has a variety of furniture which you must make your way to and search, some taking longer than others depending on the size. Each room is laid out differently requiring you to jump from platform to platform or use the lifts available in the room. To make sure your mission isn't to easy these pieces of furniture and lifts are often guarded by Atombenders army of robots. You search the pieces of furniture for pieces of the password or you can also be awarded a code for a computer which are also present in some of the rooms, the codes will allow you to affect the status of the room allowing you to freeze the robots in place or reset the lift platforms back to their original positions. The robots guard their areas in various manners, some will remain stationary and merely observe your actions, some will follow a set path from left to right and others will actively hunt for you when they see you. They also have the ability to shoot electricity at you as well, though, you're never quite sure which ones have this ability and which ones don't and quite often you don't know until it's too late.

Why is this I here you ask? Well, it's simple really, Impossible Mission is never the same game twice, the layout of the rooms, the actions and abilities of the robots are all randomly generated which makes the game much more interesting to say the least, one play through in a room might be an easy walkthrough and in others you may be presented with a tough challenge, you're never quite sure what you're going to get with each game. Death by robot or by mis-judging a jump and plummeting downwards sees a penalty of 10 minutes being removed from the time you have left to complete your mission, quite harsh then.

The PlayStation Portable version of the game includes the Original C64 version of the game for retro gaming fans (trust me memories will come flooding back as Atombenders greeting of "Another vistitor, stay a while, stay forever" comes booming out of your PSP) and an updated version of the game with enhanced graphics, and for those of you that can't make up your mind about which version to play, the game can also be mixed and matched taking the updated graphics of the lair and playing with the original character from the C64 game. It's also worth noting that the original version of the game carries with it the original 6 hour limit of game time as opposed to the new updated version which as mentioned gives you 8 hours to complete your task.

Obviously it's a tad unfair to judge the game by its original graphics, they are over twenty years old now, but the updated graphics on the PSP look sharp and detailed with the animations running smoothly. Likewise the sounds fit the game perfectly, there isn't a musical score to the game apart from the menu so you'll have to make do with background noises to keep you company as you play, this isn't a bad thing however.

The game is a tried and tested affair now, and little, if anything, has changed over the years. It's a fun title to play and can provide hours of entertainment as you try to gain access to the various parts of the password, given that the game is randomly generated then the replay value is also there to an almost infinite degree.

Time however has moved on from this style of gameplay, the secret agents that dominate the scene now such as Solid Snake and Gabe Logan make this kind of game seem outdated and may leave players wanting more from their mission to save the world, that's not to say this isn't a worth while title to pick up, but you should bear in mind before purchase that this isn't a huge game. It's not even an old dog with new tricks, it's a classic style of game that will appeal to those who just want a quick fix or remember the game of old, happily this is reflected in the price and it's not an expensive game to purchase.