Impossible Mission

The Good
I didn't play Impossible Mission the year it came out, but in 1990 on the school Commodores. Was fun, but I was hopeless at solving the password puzzles, couldn't even get one letter of the password. Looking back at mid-1984, Impossible Mission had a new depth and creativity among games of both arcade and home.

The game is kind of an adaptation of Rogue, except with a major viewpoint change, you have a side view of the cross-section of a large multi-story building. It's not sword & sorcery or even guns and grenades, the hero's main weapon is acrobatics to dodge the enemy robots. It's VERY easy to be zapped by a robot or die by coming into contact with one. Some robots are smarter than others and/or more aggressive. You have to be patient and studious to figure out how to dodge them. That, combined with the overlapping film strip puzzle solving makes this very much a puzzle solver game. The setup is sort of like a comic villain's challenge, he's given you the seemingly impossible task of finding 36 puzzle pieces hidden in furniture guarded by robots, scattered among the rooms.

I think the overall concept is great, there's only one mission, but it takes a lot of failures, hopefully learning a little more each time, to finally solve all 9 password puzzles and get to the door of Elvin Atombender's control room before "Doomsday".

The Bad
The game tries the patience pretty hard and while you don't have lives to lose you suffer a pretty hefty time penalty and when you're a beginner you can soon give up hope of getting anywhere near finishing and have to accept the progress of gaining two or three password puzzles. But the thing is, even an experienced player who knows all the rooms, the puzzle pieces and the different robot behaviour can be dealt a really cruel hand at the start by the game's reorganization. You can end up with many alert and aggressive robots guarding furniture and potential puzzle pieces seemingly impossible to get to without a lot of time and patience or a "snooze password" to temporarily deactivate the robots, but then can find no snoozes nearby. So bad luck could make the mission literally impossible even for an expert.

One little thing that I think would've helped is making the building circular like in Impossible Mission II so that you can loop back to the first column of rooms if you get to the last and find that you've missed some puzzle pieces. Another fair piece of assistance would be marking on the map, not just rooms you've entered, but rooms you've searched thoroughly.

The Bottom Line
OK, so the recent remastering of this game available on Steam seems not inferior to the original, except that they've cut off the graphic of Elvin in his control room ("No! No! No!"), so that after his door opens, the screen crossfades to the "Mission Terminated" screen. I mean, as meagre as an ancient C64 graphic of an angry, defeated mad scientist and a "Mission Complete" screen seems today, it's a lot more satisfying than "Mission Terminated" after slaving away for weeks to get to the end.

But the game is definitely a milestone of game history. For those who play it, here's some advice for solving the password puzzles. I think it's best to have about the first half of your puzzle pieces' orientation corrected over the phone and using that to determine the orientation of the matching pieces, not bothering so much to use the other over the phone help i.e. asking if you have enough pieces to finish one of the puzzles. I got much quicker at matching puzzle pieces by the time I finished the game.