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Categories: Commentary
Tags: c64, ds, gamedropping
I just picked Impossible Mission from GameStop. I was a fan of the original C64 game, the DS version was $9.99, and it’s a GameStop exclusive so I felt like if I didn’t buy it right away evil fairies would spirit it away and sell it on Ebay for Valkyrie Profile-sized bucks.
Here’s the game’s description: Impossible Mission puts you in the role of a secret agent who must infiltrate the enemy base and avoid deadly robots to thwart Professor Atombender. That translates to cool platforming action. There are elevators, killer robots, and an acrobatic main character who is Han Solo-esque.
Back in the day, Impossible Mission was part of a genre I called “Games I like to play, but don’t understand what I’m supposed to do.” Other games in this category included M.U.L.E., Indiana Jones in the Lost Kingdom, and Fantastic Four (where I could watch The Thing slowly die in a tar pit).
Part of the problem was that most of my games were poorly cracked, so it wasn’t uncommon for them to just die. For instance, winning Aztec Challenge meant playing through to where it crashed. Half the levels in Knight Games didn’t work. But even store bought games (the few I had), sucked. Gauntlet worked half the time. Rambo had a game ending bug after the first raid on a POW camp. And I had some math game which involved using a dog as a trampoline that worked the first night, but never again.
Frankly, I was better off with a stack of pirated games which came from a source my uncle had (until said source landed in prison). If I bought a game I knew what it was, but if I was handed a stack of 5-1/4’s I could LOAD “$”,8,1 and LIST my way through a potential treasure house. Right off the bat, half of the games wouldn’t work (damn you, Yie Ar Kung-Fu), but the ones that did could be anything. And if my source had done the hole-punch trick, then I had a whole other side to explore.
Of course, then the challenge was figuring out controls- slowly pressing key after key to see if anything happened on screen. And so it was with Impossible Mission. I could run, jump, dodge robots (sometimes), but beyond that–you know, the whole thwarting Professor Atombender part– I had no clue. You just don’t get the same experience with today’s copyprotected, quality assured games– and it’s a damn shame.
On January 3rd, 2008 at 11:09 pm, Chris wrote:
Yay for C64 memories: including remembering The Thing’s slow death by tar…. many times over.
I miss Mail Order Monsters, Archon, and Telengard. All these games I played, and I never even had a C64 of my own.. just endless days at my friend’s house.
On January 4th, 2008 at 2:01 pm, terry wrote:
I don’t know Mail Order Monsters, but having done some research I would totally play that now.