Impossible Mission - 8/10

Overview
This is a port of a game that I used to play on the Commodore 64, and the DS version is very good.
You are a secret agent that has to go through a building using elevators and navigating rooms while searching for peices of a puzzle that will give you a password to complete the game.
This sounds easy, but the rooms contain robots with zappers and a puzzle of lifts to try and stop you or at least slow you down.

Game Modes
This has not been a direct port of the game. Codemasters have enhanced the graphics and complexity of the game while still allowing you to play the original version.

*New*
The new vesion of the game is excellent. Every texture has been greatly enhanced. The sound quality is much better and the difficulty has been increased. In this mode you get to choose from 3 players, they are Alpha1 who is a male Matrix looking dude, Gamma who looks like a Terminator without his skin and Delta a female player. They all seem to perform the same to me but the girl is better to look at in her nice shorts. The game maker has even gone to the trouble of making her hair flow when she summersalts.

You have 8 hours to complete your mission of searching the rooms for peices of the puzzle. This may sound like a long time but you lose 10 minutes everytime you die, which means that it is very easy to lose 30 - 40 minutes in a difficult room.
To search a room you just stand in front of a desk or candy machine etc and press up on the control pad. A meter will appear showing how long it will take to search and once fully searched it will show if you found anything. There are 4 things that can be found.
1. Nothing.
2. A piece of the puzzle.
3. A snooze.
4. Lift reset.
In every room there is a computer terminal which allows you to put the robots in the room to sleep or allows you to reset the lifts to their original position in that room. To use these function you of coarse need number 3 and 4 items to be able to access the functions.

*Classic*
Codemasters have left the game totally alone in this mode.
It is the original down to every detail. The colour pallet has alot less colours the graphics are a little chunky (not much) and uses early synthesized sound technology. I love it.
This mode is not as hard as the NEW mode but it is still a challenge. In this mode you have 6 hours to complete the puzzle as there is not as many rooms. In regards to game play all the rest from New mode applies, the only difference is you do not get a choice of character to play.

*Merged*
This mode is the same as new mode but you play with the original character.

Solving the puzzle

I'm not going to give you a step by step on solving the puzzle as this would then become a walkthrough and not a review.

Anywhere in the game just tap on the puzzle icon on the touch screen and you will go into puzzle solving mode. This is slightly different to the original game as you could only go into puzzle solving mode in a corridor linking the rooms.

Now you are able to go through the peices of the puzzle and put them together. The idea is to put 4 peices together to make what looks like an old computer punch card. Once this is done you will get a letter for the password.
This all sounds easy but there is a catch. The peices are not orientated correctly which means you will have to flip and turn some peices. The peices are also different colours so you will have to change the colours of some peices. You can get some assistance by calling up a computer and finding out if you have enough peices to solve a set of four or find out if a peice is orientated correctly.

Once you have the password you go to the control room door and provide the password to open it. This door is located in one of the rooms that you would have passed on your search for peices.

Game Play
Having played the original I may be a bit critical of playing this on the DS. I just found the controls where not as responsive as when playing this on C64. I found that the timing for jumps and things where alot different than I remember and I found myself dying alot. This is not a bad thing, all it means is I have to re-learn the game and get more life out of it. The platform part of the game is played using the control pad and the puzzle solving part can be done using the stylus.

Being able to save your game was not available in the original only being able to pause was there. The bottom screen gives you a map of the rooms and the colour of a room changes when you have collected everything that can be collected. The map was available on the original but not the change of colour of the rooms. These two things are a great advantage and will make the game easier to play.

Conclusion
I thought the port and remake are excellent. I am totally happy with the new look and gameplay on the DS. This has not spoilt the nostalgia for me at all. I did not give it a perfect score because I was a little disapointed over the responsiveness of the controls. Don't get me wrong you can do all the same moves its just that you have to slightly pause between moves which I used to be able to make flow with no pause.
To make myself clear, I used to be able to sumersalt in one direction and straight back again. Now you have to pause before you go back, if you don't you will keep going in the same direction or you will step back without a summersalt. this cramped my playing style. I still love it.

Room from new version

Graphics - 8/10
Story - 9/10
Gameplay - 8/10
Sound - 7/10

Submitted by Eldude 24/02/2008 5

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Impossible Mission

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• Eldude Review 8/10 by Eldude

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