Mission Impossible (N64)
Mission Impossible on the N64 took a few steps out of the norm for games upon it's time of release. Most shooters at the time were of the run-and-gun variety, but with Mission Impossible, the developers tried to make players use a new approach of stealth and steadiness. But, did it work? Or did it fall on it's face? Let's find out.
While this is all happening, Candice Parker is kidnapped by a worker at the Russian Embassy in Prague, Alexander Golystine. Along with her, he also steals half of a NOC list (Non-Official Cover), a list that contains all the real and fake names for all the agents of the IMF across the globe. The half of the list is useless on it's own, as the other half is needed to access everything and decrypt it, but the embassy contains a super-computer that they believe can break the code and gain access to the full document.
Ethan and his team are sent in to rescue her and recover the stolen half of the NOC list, but afterwards he is brought into the CIA under interrogation for being a mole. His personal task then becomes to break out of the CIA and discover who the mole truly is.
Your joystick (the one and only) controls Ethan's movements. The camera swings along behind him, following him on the missions, but you can adjust this slightly by either using the L button to zoom in closer to Ethan, or (while zoomed farther out) the D-Pad buttons will jolt the camera in which ever direction you've pushed.
A button acts as your action button, and a jump button. The B button gains access to your inventory, of which you basically have two types (I'll describe these in the next section). One inventory is laid along the bottom of the screen from left to right, and you scroll through these items by tapping B, and then selecting whichever you want with A. The other inventory goes up and down on the right hand side of the screen which you scroll through by using the down of the C-buttons, and again tapping A to select which you want.
You fire your weapons with the Z button, but can hold the R button to bring up a crosshair for more precise aiming. While you're aiming like this, the C-buttons act as strafing buttons so you can continue to move while aiming (since the joystick controls the position of the crosshair). When not aiming, the only C-button control is the down one allows you to crouch. But when you're crouched, you can't move around at all so except for hiding and playing peek-a-boo with the enemies, the crouch was just about useless in my opinion.
So again, other than going through the quick mental readjust of only having one joystick, the controls are pretty easy to get the hang of.
In each level, you notice your radar in the corner of the screen. On it, are three different colored blips displayed. You have red ones, white ones, and green ones. The green ones are your teammates, whether it's someone who is hiding in the shadows while you lead the way through, or people that are blatantly hiding in plain sight in the level itself. Red blips tend to mark the things you must pick up in the level, whether it's a weapon, or one of your spy items. If you didn't start the mission with something that you need, it's in one of these locations. Lastly, the white blips denote your objective waypoints. These are the the places you need to go and either do something specific with whatever the blip marks, or use one of your inventory items here. With these, the game gives you a little bit of free roam. There is no set order in which you must complete these things, however there is a sort of "preferred" order, but I'll break that down a little later.
The enemies you come across are pretty generic to say the least. There's no bosses, just security guards you have to deal with that go down with either one or two shots (one if you hit them in the head, two if in the body). Tranquilizer darts take everyone down with one shot regardless of where you hit them. Instead, the level itself almost becomes an enemy. Certain areas can only be accessed while wearing the right disguise, and even if you're in the right disguise you're still not safe because if someone sees you with a gun or something you shouldn't have, your cover gets blown. There's security cameras you have to be wary of, laser traps, all sorts of things that make it a blessing with the moments where you just need to put a couple bullets into someone.
Your inventory gets split into two different categories. The first is your actual shooting weapons (the inventory displayed along the bottom of the screen). This is where you find everything from your fists to your handgun, tranquilizer gun, taser gun, anything that fires some sort of projectile is here. The other part of your inventory is your gadgets like the facemaker, any computer discs you need, smoke generators, and the explosive gum. This inventory is the one displayed along the right hand side of the screen. Whatever weapons you need are usually supplied from the start of the level, while the gadgets typically need to be found in-level.
Unfortunately, there isn't a ton of flavor with this game. It's all pretty cut and dry : you get into the level, do what you have to do or find who/what you have to find, and then get out. There's a few little mini games, like how the hanging wire scene from the movie gets incorporated into the game. Instead of just quietly descending down into the room, you have to dodge an active laser grid while you descend, but if you hit them it doesn't raise any alarms, only burns you a little bit.
So, let's just break this game down a little more.
First, the enemies. Individually, they're a piece of cake. two shots from the hip bring them down, or a single headshot or tranq dart will bring them down as well. You never come across any "heavy" types that need more ammo to take down. But, when they come in packs, it can be a bit overwhelming. If you raise an alarm, they seem to have an endless supply of enemies. In the embassy mission when you're rescuing Candice, you're under the disguise of the man who kidnapped her. If you happen to be walking with a weapon out, someone shouts out that you're a traitor and your cover is done for. I probably spent a good five minutes, thinking I could just waste everyone in the area and go on with the mission, but they just didn't stop coming. If this happens to you, you have two options : try and stay alive until you get cornered and captured, or stay alive until you get killed. Either way, you will run out of ammo long beforehand.
Your objectives can get frustrating at times as well. And I don't mean the objectives themselves, I mean when one of them happens to change/update on the fly. You get absolutely no notification for it. During your escape with Candice, you get separated in a hallway. Once you find your way back to where you got split up, a door opens up and a man goes running off down the hall. He ran right by me and didn't stop to try and kill or capture me so I ran past him and rescued Candice. Mission : Failed. Apparently, this guy ended up stealing the NOC list off of her and you have to get it back from him. Thanks for the update.
The levels themselves aren't so bad. Like I mentioned earlier, some of them are pretty straightforward : you start at one end of a room/hallway and you need to make it to the other side. Others incorporate the free roam aspect : you're dropped in an area and have a handful of things to obtain/objectives to complete, get them done and get out. Some are a bit too easy, and some make it near impossible to get through undetected. While escaping from the interrogation at the CIA, at first you are left weaponless. You happen across a can of spray paint as a way to get past the security cameras in the building. The only issue is, it's not so easy to get close enough to cover them without getting spotted by them and having officers come your way.
So, the game itself? Not very challenging, pretty simple and straight forward. The speed bumps along the way though are annoying of their own league. While it's easy to recognize that they are their own issues, and aren't a part of the games difficulty specifically, they don't help it either. Without them, the game might be near perfect, but with their presence, it really does feel at times like the mission is impossible.
But, let's look at the good and the bad side of Mission Impossible
- The free roam is pretty great. It's a little tiring when you're stuck on a single path, only able to move in a single direction. Getting plopped into a building and being given a shopping list of objectives to complete is nice. You get to wander, get a lay of the land and decide the best approach for your own playstyle.
- Emphasis on stealth. No matter what type of game I play, I'm always finding the sneakiest, stealthiest way to do things. Even in first person shooter's. So to have a game that not only encourages but emphasizes that? Definitely gets a plus in my book.
- Lack of voice acting. Again, they had an opportunity for it. The cutscenes are filled with voice acting, but in the levels everything becomes text based. They even ported this game over to the PS1 and threw in the voice acting, so maybe I'm just being picky and the N64 boards didn't have the capacity for it (if that's the case then ignore this con). But having it in the cutscenes, and having little "Nice job!" quips come up when you get a good shot on an enemy, it's definitely missed.
The Story
The game roughly follows the plot of the movie it shares it's name with. It begins with Jim Phelps sitting in a park receiving the details of a mission : There is a plot by a group of terrorists in Norway to ship some missiles to a rival country. The IMF task force (led by Ethan Hunt) is sent in to foil the plot by infiltrating a submarine base, locating the sub (as it contains the missiles) and destroy it.While this is all happening, Candice Parker is kidnapped by a worker at the Russian Embassy in Prague, Alexander Golystine. Along with her, he also steals half of a NOC list (Non-Official Cover), a list that contains all the real and fake names for all the agents of the IMF across the globe. The half of the list is useless on it's own, as the other half is needed to access everything and decrypt it, but the embassy contains a super-computer that they believe can break the code and gain access to the full document.
Ethan and his team are sent in to rescue her and recover the stolen half of the NOC list, but afterwards he is brought into the CIA under interrogation for being a mole. His personal task then becomes to break out of the CIA and discover who the mole truly is.
The Controls
The controls for the game aren't bad. However, the controls for any N64 look and feel atrocious when you look back on them from present day gaming. Having two joysticks has become such second nature that going back and playing games with only one, it sends your head for a little spin. But, while they're different, they aren't bad.Your joystick (the one and only) controls Ethan's movements. The camera swings along behind him, following him on the missions, but you can adjust this slightly by either using the L button to zoom in closer to Ethan, or (while zoomed farther out) the D-Pad buttons will jolt the camera in which ever direction you've pushed.
A button acts as your action button, and a jump button. The B button gains access to your inventory, of which you basically have two types (I'll describe these in the next section). One inventory is laid along the bottom of the screen from left to right, and you scroll through these items by tapping B, and then selecting whichever you want with A. The other inventory goes up and down on the right hand side of the screen which you scroll through by using the down of the C-buttons, and again tapping A to select which you want.
You fire your weapons with the Z button, but can hold the R button to bring up a crosshair for more precise aiming. While you're aiming like this, the C-buttons act as strafing buttons so you can continue to move while aiming (since the joystick controls the position of the crosshair). When not aiming, the only C-button control is the down one allows you to crouch. But when you're crouched, you can't move around at all so except for hiding and playing peek-a-boo with the enemies, the crouch was just about useless in my opinion.
So again, other than going through the quick mental readjust of only having one joystick, the controls are pretty easy to get the hang of.
The Gameplay
The missions of the game, with the exception of the sub base in the beginning, roughly go along with the Tom Cruise movie, so if you've seen that, you basically already know how the game plays out. You're just along for the ride to the same location, just with a few scenic shortcuts. Each mission brings you something different. You have levels that focus more on just getting the job done at all costs, and others that require your best stealth skills. Some of them load you out with all your equipment from the beginning, while others force you to find the things you need along the way. And there's levels that are a kind of a wide open space where you can dilly-dally around, while some are in tight, constricting, one-way hallways.In each level, you notice your radar in the corner of the screen. On it, are three different colored blips displayed. You have red ones, white ones, and green ones. The green ones are your teammates, whether it's someone who is hiding in the shadows while you lead the way through, or people that are blatantly hiding in plain sight in the level itself. Red blips tend to mark the things you must pick up in the level, whether it's a weapon, or one of your spy items. If you didn't start the mission with something that you need, it's in one of these locations. Lastly, the white blips denote your objective waypoints. These are the the places you need to go and either do something specific with whatever the blip marks, or use one of your inventory items here. With these, the game gives you a little bit of free roam. There is no set order in which you must complete these things, however there is a sort of "preferred" order, but I'll break that down a little later.
The enemies you come across are pretty generic to say the least. There's no bosses, just security guards you have to deal with that go down with either one or two shots (one if you hit them in the head, two if in the body). Tranquilizer darts take everyone down with one shot regardless of where you hit them. Instead, the level itself almost becomes an enemy. Certain areas can only be accessed while wearing the right disguise, and even if you're in the right disguise you're still not safe because if someone sees you with a gun or something you shouldn't have, your cover gets blown. There's security cameras you have to be wary of, laser traps, all sorts of things that make it a blessing with the moments where you just need to put a couple bullets into someone.
Your inventory gets split into two different categories. The first is your actual shooting weapons (the inventory displayed along the bottom of the screen). This is where you find everything from your fists to your handgun, tranquilizer gun, taser gun, anything that fires some sort of projectile is here. The other part of your inventory is your gadgets like the facemaker, any computer discs you need, smoke generators, and the explosive gum. This inventory is the one displayed along the right hand side of the screen. Whatever weapons you need are usually supplied from the start of the level, while the gadgets typically need to be found in-level.
Unfortunately, there isn't a ton of flavor with this game. It's all pretty cut and dry : you get into the level, do what you have to do or find who/what you have to find, and then get out. There's a few little mini games, like how the hanging wire scene from the movie gets incorporated into the game. Instead of just quietly descending down into the room, you have to dodge an active laser grid while you descend, but if you hit them it doesn't raise any alarms, only burns you a little bit.
So, let's just break this game down a little more.
The Challenge (or lack thereof?)
Mission Impossible comes with a decent amount of challenges, but they're from poor AI programming and lack of information.First, the enemies. Individually, they're a piece of cake. two shots from the hip bring them down, or a single headshot or tranq dart will bring them down as well. You never come across any "heavy" types that need more ammo to take down. But, when they come in packs, it can be a bit overwhelming. If you raise an alarm, they seem to have an endless supply of enemies. In the embassy mission when you're rescuing Candice, you're under the disguise of the man who kidnapped her. If you happen to be walking with a weapon out, someone shouts out that you're a traitor and your cover is done for. I probably spent a good five minutes, thinking I could just waste everyone in the area and go on with the mission, but they just didn't stop coming. If this happens to you, you have two options : try and stay alive until you get cornered and captured, or stay alive until you get killed. Either way, you will run out of ammo long beforehand.
Your objectives can get frustrating at times as well. And I don't mean the objectives themselves, I mean when one of them happens to change/update on the fly. You get absolutely no notification for it. During your escape with Candice, you get separated in a hallway. Once you find your way back to where you got split up, a door opens up and a man goes running off down the hall. He ran right by me and didn't stop to try and kill or capture me so I ran past him and rescued Candice. Mission : Failed. Apparently, this guy ended up stealing the NOC list off of her and you have to get it back from him. Thanks for the update.
The levels themselves aren't so bad. Like I mentioned earlier, some of them are pretty straightforward : you start at one end of a room/hallway and you need to make it to the other side. Others incorporate the free roam aspect : you're dropped in an area and have a handful of things to obtain/objectives to complete, get them done and get out. Some are a bit too easy, and some make it near impossible to get through undetected. While escaping from the interrogation at the CIA, at first you are left weaponless. You happen across a can of spray paint as a way to get past the security cameras in the building. The only issue is, it's not so easy to get close enough to cover them without getting spotted by them and having officers come your way.
So, the game itself? Not very challenging, pretty simple and straight forward. The speed bumps along the way though are annoying of their own league. While it's easy to recognize that they are their own issues, and aren't a part of the games difficulty specifically, they don't help it either. Without them, the game might be near perfect, but with their presence, it really does feel at times like the mission is impossible.
But, let's look at the good and the bad side of Mission Impossible
PROS
- You get plenty of gems from the movie thrown into the game. You (obviously) have the theme, you get to use the facemaker and the explosive gum, and they managed to include the acrobatic hanging sequence into the CIA's computer room. It's a cool touch, that they stayed close enough to the movie to make the fans happy, but at the same time made it it's own element.- The free roam is pretty great. It's a little tiring when you're stuck on a single path, only able to move in a single direction. Getting plopped into a building and being given a shopping list of objectives to complete is nice. You get to wander, get a lay of the land and decide the best approach for your own playstyle.
- Emphasis on stealth. No matter what type of game I play, I'm always finding the sneakiest, stealthiest way to do things. Even in first person shooter's. So to have a game that not only encourages but emphasizes that? Definitely gets a plus in my book.
CONS
- No heads-up for objectives. It isn't like they didn't have an opportunity for it. Up in the top left of the screen, there's an almost constant flow of text. Notifications when an enemy drops a gun or ammo, dialogue between anyone you talk to in the levels, even notifications of when you complete your objectives. But when they change? Apparently it wasn't deemed need-to-know for the player. I'd be a little more forgiving if you didn't get the pop-ups for completing an objective, but come on. If you can tell me when I've completed an objective, you can tell me when one changes or when I get a new one.- Lack of voice acting. Again, they had an opportunity for it. The cutscenes are filled with voice acting, but in the levels everything becomes text based. They even ported this game over to the PS1 and threw in the voice acting, so maybe I'm just being picky and the N64 boards didn't have the capacity for it (if that's the case then ignore this con). But having it in the cutscenes, and having little "Nice job!" quips come up when you get a good shot on an enemy, it's definitely missed.
