NES

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.

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.

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.