Game 1: Impossible Mission
- Plays All The Things
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
"AAAAAAAGHHHHHHHH" - Me falling into a pit again. Impossible Mission was a Commodore 64 game that people were dedicated enough to that they recreated it so you can play it on a web browser, which I am doing via this site: https://impossible-mission.krissz.hu/
This site is really great as it not only lets you play the game but it includes a menu where you can view the game's manual (which is often necessary for older games like this). It even lets you play the game via a controller, which is how I'm playing it.
Impossible Mission gives you a time limit of six hours to infiltrate Professor Elvin Atombender's stronghold by avoiding pits and robots and searching furniture for password fragments. After my first attempt I was able to search a couple rooms successfully but ran out of time because apparently when you die it adds ten minutes to your total time, and I'm dying quite a bit - the platforming is very touchy and jumping moves you an exact distance forward so there's no opportunity to correct your landing - you're going to make it or not based on where you start. The 'AAAAAAGHHHHH' sound effect for falling in a pit is far, far worse than being killed by a robot.
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My second attempt is going far better than my first - I'm learning a delightful variety of robot patterns via trial and error (And there is quite a variety! Some robots actively charge you and others only try to shock you if they can see you - some just wander and fire randomly, and occasionally they'll just stand in place), and I've been able to clear the furniture in most of the rooms on this map either via dodging the robots or shutting them down via a limited number of 'shutdown robot' passwords you can find. The rooms themselves are not randomly generated and come from a set, so I plan to practice the difficult rooms when I find them so they can be cleared in future games. I took this screenshot with about 20 minutes left on my timer so I expect this run will end shortly. ---
Without the manual it would have been tough to figure out that this isn't a 'Simon' type puzzle where you click the squares in the order they were shown - the puzzle shows you a sequence in a random order and then it's up to you to press them in ascending musical tone. You can solve it as many times as you like with each puzzle adding another square to the sequence. Each time you solve it gives you a one-use 'shut down the robots' or 'reset the lifts' password - the latter to be used whenever you accidentally fall in a room and you've left the lifts out of position to bring you back up. You can always die in the room to reset the lifts if you need to but this costs valuable time.
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I've been collecting these 'puzzle pieces' shown at the bottom of the screen (the manual mentions these are for the solution to the final room) and I initially assumed that you had to join them up the same way you would a jigsaw puzzle, by matching their edges together to form a larger picture. Not so! You actually overlay the pieces on top of each other - so that center-bottom and top-right piece actually combine to form the bottom-right image there. Pieces have to be of the same color to be matched but you can change the puzzle piece colors as well as flip them vertically or horizontally, so I'm going to need a chunk of time still available by the last room to solve this. ---
I mean, just look at it! How do you go up? You'd think the 'stairs' on the left, but no - you're a long jumper, you have no chance at those. You have to take the center lift platform up and jump between the center platforms and the ones occupied by robots. And the floor pits kill me half the time I'm trying to get to the lift platform in the first place. ---
I had an incredible run that came within a hair's breadth of beating the game. Each puzzle you assemble gets you a letter of the final password, and here you can see I had 8 of 9 letters - and 3 of the 4 remaining puzzle pieces. I died my last few deaths trying to search the few furniture items I had bypassed - but you really probably do need to try to get all of them to win. If I can get a run like this, victory is within my grasp!
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There is this one other 'ball' enemy type that usually just follows you slowly, and unless you let it trap you isn't much of a threat especially because you can kite it into the regular robots and for some reason it dies with the other robots touch it. This one however moves in a rapid 'infinity' pattern and makes the upper part of the floor extremely hard to navigate. This is a room worthy of using one of your limited 'shut off the robots' passwords.
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MISSION..... POSSIBLE!
After several more attempts and figuring out which rooms I wanted to use the robot snoozes on I made it with less than 10 minutes to spare (thus it came down to my very last life). This really was a solid C64 game and I can see why people loved it, and thanks to the website at the start of this post you can give it a shot yourself if you're inclined.
I don't recall how many attempts it took me, it wasn't a huge amount but I did begin just restarting an attempt rather than continue it if I starting dying early.
Also, the password changes each game (for what that's worth). I won on 'SWORDFISH'.
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