Impossible Mission is a curious beast. Not only is it a remake of a classic Commodore 64 game originally by Epyx, it’s a game that was originally released as a full PSP title but now re-released as a Mini.

As I grew up owning a C-64 during its heyday, I am quite familiar with the original game, which was a very popular title. I always believed that much of its popularity was due to its use of speech, something of a novelty at the time. When you started the game, you were greeted by a synthesized voice that exclaimed, “Another visitor. Stay awhile… Staaaaay FOREVER!”

You play a secret agent (who for some reason dresses like Han Solo), infiltrating the secret underground base of an evil genius, Dr. Elvin Atombender. You have six hours to search his base for a passcode to stop his most recent evil plan. You don’t have a set number of lives, though each time you die you lose ten minutes from the countdown clock.

It’s a combination platformer and puzzle game. You explore Dr. Atombender’s complex room by room. Each room is essentially a small one-screen 2D platforming level, complete with platforms, objects, elevators, and your enemy in the game, security robots.

You need to search every object in a room in order to find either puzzle pieces (which you then put together to form the passcode) or codes you can use to either shut down the robots for a while (”robot snooze pass”) or reset the elevators (”lift reset”).

Your secret agent’s only ability is to somersault forward over obstacles. He can’t jump up, and while he can fall down great distances without injury, you have to watch out for pits. So searching a whole room is rather tricky.

And that doesn’t take into account contending with the security robots. Some of them just stand there, some move, and some will zap you. Except for one, an Evil Otto-type hovering sphere, the robots do have a limited amount of motion, so it’s mostly about timing. Still, in some cases you have no real choice but to use a robot snooze pass to search every object. This means you need to have one first, and if you don’t, you need to go on to another room and come back. So your memory plays a big role in this game—remembering where you’ve been and where you need to go back to.

Each time you play, the game is randomized. There are only a certain number of rooms, but where they appear in the complex changes. And, the abilities of the robots in each room change. So while you can get better at getting around the platforms of a room, you never know what to expect from its mechanical guards.

There are 36 puzzle pieces total, and you need to collect them all, then put them together (they are puzzle pieces, after all) using your datapad. It’s a little annoying to do, actually; they look like pieces of abstract art so it’s hard to say.

Once you do that with all the pieces, you get a code to enter the control room. And after that, presumably you win, though I must confess, I never have beaten the game. When I was a kid, I’d play about 15 minutes before getting bored and deliberately moving my guy into pits, where the game would play a digitized scream. If you do beat the game, you are apparently given a score, as there is a high scores table.

Besides the platformer rooms, there is the musical puzzle room. You enter, and it plays a series of notes and flashes corresponding squares. You then must play the notes back, not in order, but from the lowest tone to highest tone. When you do it correctly, you get a robot snooze or lift reset pass.

Being quite tone deaf (and a bit hard of hearing on top of that) I’ve never managed to be able to do this correctly, then or now, except by trial and error. It’s pretty easy to do once or twice, as it starts with only 3 notes and adds more every time you are successful.

There are three different modes, Classic, New, and Merged. Classic is the C-64 version, or at least same graphics, speech, and difficulty level.

New and Merged are basically the same, as they both use new background graphics and let you use the easier difficulty which gives you 8 hours instead of just 6. You can also pick which agent to use—in Merged, the Han Solo-looking guy, while in New you have the choice between two refugees from The Matrix (a guy in a suit and a woman in tight leather) and what really looks like Bender from Futurama crossed with a Terminator. Each agent plays the same, but they have different screams when they fall.

They didn’t just update the background graphics to look better; there are a lot of small touches and effects. Pretty nice-looking, actually. There are even idle animations for your guy.

Although it’s a solid update to a classic game, I have to feel that the classic in question is somewhat overrated. Like I did when I was 13, I found myself bored after only a few rooms and sending my agent into oblivion, laughing as he screamed.

They did try to make the game easier, but they didn’t make the game shorter. While presumably someone good at this will take less than 6 hours to complete it, the average person is going to spend hours and probably never finish. Since they remade it, why not make a less than impossible mission? Say only 3 or 4 puzzle pieces? Or maybe a mode where you just get the code piece by piece and don’t have to put them together as puzzles?

While you can mercifully save and load your game in progress, because of the memorization needed, I don’t think it’s all that well suited for multiple sessions.

So, while it’s a pretty solid update of the game’s presentation values, they didn’t do much to improve the game itself. If you are an Impossible Mission fan, this is a plus, but for me, it was a minus.

6.5/10