Hostage: Rescue Mission

Before there was Rainbow Six, gamers could plan missions and drop tangos with Rescue. The basic idea is that terrorists have captured a three-story embassy building, and you control a squad of six expert counter-terrorist operatives as they infiltrate the building, and free the hostages inside. This mission plays out in stages as you must first position your snipers, take out what terrorists you can through the windows, then rappel down the building, enter through a window, and sweep the building clean of all enemies. Sound like it rocks? Oh yes, it does indeed.

Hostage is yet another great game from way back! I used to love this game (although I’ve played it mostly on C64) and it hasn’t lost any of its charm (neither through porting to PC, nor through the aging process). The premise is simple. You are in charge of a special forces, who need to break into the embassy and free all the hostages. You have the choice to either get all the hostages out of the building or simply shoot all the terrorists.

Unfortunately, no matter how fun, innovative and challenging Rescue is, the fact tat you can beat it in literally five minutes kills it's chance of being a true classic. Sure you can scale up the difficulty, but it's the same damn sequence over and over. What a missed opportunity.

Scrolling is iffy in places and the repetitive backing music is less than thrilling, but the SAS-style gameplay is as exciting and fun as ever.

While both loads vary wildly in format, the two sections hold together well as a game. Troop deployment in level one is a lot of fun, with your man having to duck, dive, somersault and get shot every time a spotlight comes your way. Where Hostages really comes into its own, though, is on the second load. Even with the map an enormous feeling of 'who's there?' is present every time you turn a corner. Lasting qualities are questionable, due to the lack of stages, but there are a host of difficulty levels which should keep most budding SASers going for a while.

Un gioco originale e sopra la media, di cui non assicuriamo la longevità…

Quite long for what it is, I loved this game as a kid but it didn’t survive time. It is quite simple and fast, the charm of NES games, but too simple and at the end you feel just the assault matters, and the other parts of the game are just to make levels last more.

The embassy-storming idea certainly has plenty of potential, but unfortunately this game doesn't realise it. While it initially seems quite fun, the sub-games are all easy to master, and once you've learned the basic skills required to beat the terrorists, it all becomes a matter of routine - which isn't what playing console games is about. Both the graphics and sound are bland, a description that suits the gameplay too. There's simply not enough excitement to keep you at your Nintendo for more than a few sessions.