Impossible Mission II (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
201A playthrough of American Video Entertainment's unlicensed 1989 action game for the NES, Impossible Mission II.
The name Impossible Mission probably doesn't mean much to console gamers, but if you were gaming on a Commodore 64 in the late 1980s, I'm sure you're already quite familiar.
The two Impossible Mission games on the C64 were created by Novotrade, a company that did a lot of contract work for Konami and Sega in the early 90s (remember the NES version of King's Quest V, or the Ecco the Dolphin series?), and published by Epyx, the guys responsible for California Games and the Atari Lynx, amongst other things. This unlicensed NES cart has a better pedigree than most, and even better, Novotrade themselves handled the NES port.
According to the manual, Impossible Mission II puts you in control of an "Agency Field Agent" for Cobra Blue, a counter-terrorist operation that's trying to bring down the "psychotic genius" known as Dr. Elvin Atombender.
Elvin lives in "an immense eight-tower complex constructed with his personal funds in northwest Los Angeles near the UCLA campus," "believed to be staffed entirely by robots of his own design." It's your job to infiltrate the tower and crack the security system so that you can put a stop to Dr. Atombender's plan to destroy the world.
Each of the eight towers holds a piece of music locked away in a safe, and you need to collect all six unique tunes to unlock the central elevator control and reach Dr. Atombender. Two of the tunes are repeats, so you have to keep track of the ones you've already found with your tape recorder.
You'll also need to search each tower for the three-digit code that will unlock the way to the next tower. You can find the color-coded digits, along with several useful items that you can activate at the computer terminals, by searching all of the items you find in each room. Stuff can be hidden in exercise equipment, busted cars, office water bubblers, or anything other random thing you come across, but you have to be careful. The murder robots don't stop patrolling as you perform these searches so you'll need an exit plan in case any get too close.
The computer terminals give you plenty of ways of dealing with each room, though. As long as you've found the appropriate item, you'll be able to blow holes through platforms (and enemies) with bombs and mines, temporarily disable all the robots in the area, move platforms, or turn on the lights in dark areas.
You'll need to take advantage of all these things, too, because Impossible Mission II is a fairly difficult game. The time limit is strict, and though you don't have lives per se, everytime you die you lose time on the game clock. You don't have to play flawlessly, but blundering through it will get you a game over screen pretty quickly.
The platforming can be difficult to get used to - it requires a lot more pixel-perfect precision than something like Mario does, like most computer games of the time - but it does get much easier with practice. That being said, failure in Impossible Mission II is much more fun than in your typical game - especially when you misjudge a jump and go flying into a pit.
As you plummet to your death, your character lets loose the best blood-curdling scream I think I've ever heard in a video game. To call it epic would be a gross understatement. Check out 3:40 to hear it for yourself.
Amazing, right?
The rest of the presentation is pretty good, too. There isn't much music, but the computer bloops and whirs do a good job at not being annoying. The graphics are nicely done - there are a lot of little details going on in each room and your character's animation is super smooth. The color palette choices aren't ideal, but it was the 80s, and the visuals are a solid improvement over the Commodore 64 originals.
I really got into Impossible Mission II. It's a unique concept for a platformer and the NES conversion is a quality way to experience it. It's not an easy game to find at a reasonable price, but if you like precision platforming, you'll find a good bit to like here.
(And how great is that ending? If you're only going to get one screen, that's the way to do it.)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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