IMPOSSIBLE MISSION

A review of the new book on the series.

“

Another visitor. Stay a while. Stay forever!” With one of the most remembered videogame introductions of all time, Impossible Mission remains to this day a classic nearly forty years after its release, highly popular within the Commodore scene, and source of many a quip and quote based on its speech. With so many people having played both the original and its sequel, or one of the many subsequent ports, it's not that surprising someone has taken a stab at producing an allencompassing guide and encyclopaedia about them.

The book is handily broken down in specific sections such as interviews, version reviews, playing guides and so forth, although it is perhaps a little too fastidious in its sub-bulleting therewith. A few less headings and divisions would have let the content flow somewhat easier, but it does make it relatively easy to find the section or page you are searching for.

The meat and core of the book is right at the beginning, with interviews with some of the key programmers across various versions (including Dennis Caswell himself) and biographies on a number of publishers, a large part dedicated to Epyx itself. While most of this profile has nothing to do with the Impossible Mission games at all, it does provide an engaging in-depth examination of its beginnings through to fateful sell-off at the end.

When it comes to helping you through both games with detailed tips, it gives with one hand and partly takes back with the other. Whereas you are taken through a room by room tour of the original lair with a short explanation about the best way to solve each one (swearing aside), there are merely screenshots presented of the rooms from the sequel (at least with the lights on) with no hints presented whatsoever. Given some of these are rather complex to decipher, especially a couple of the safe rooms, it's a bit of a disappointment. The rest of Impossible Mission 2 is covered in more than sufficient detail.

The explanation of

how the puzzle section operates is wonderfully precise and dotted with plenty of screenshots and text to hopefully banish the blues of any joystick wielder who has struggled putting the punch cards together. This writer always “got it” but it wasn't so obvious to others. Honestly between the manual and the playing guide present for the original Impossible Mission, the only thing lacking from this section is a rundown of the individual droid behaviours, of which there are 24 in total.

The version review section is very comprehensive, detailing pretty much every single instance of either Impossible Mission title, statistics, facts about who wrote and published them, and some background information about the systems themselves. Even as a major IM fan there were a couple of ports this writer was completely unaware of existing. The only negative here is that a lot of the version comparison opinion isn't long enough to garner a full view of how each port measures up to the

Commodore originals, and in some cases we presume the author was unable to attain a copy of said port in order to review it.

Fans are often what keep the memory of a game alive, and the final section of the book looks at various images, videos, models, stories and more produced over the last 35 years. Some of these were quite entertaining, and this writer would certainly not say no to a 3D model of Agent 4125. The tribute song is a little on the weird side however. There is also a nod to the wife of a certain other ZZAP! reviewer!

You do get a lot of content for your money,

other authors take note, but that's tinged with realising (due to the inline credits) that a fair proportion of the book has been reused with permission from other sources and isn't actually new. In some circumstances this is completely understandable such as the interview with Dennis Caswell given he, like Elvin Atombender, is quite reclusive in general, whereas rewriting other parts would have been appreciated.

In conclusion, if you have any sort of interest in Epyx's pair of classic games or the company itself then this book should provide more than enough engaging reading, otherwise it might be a bit of a hard sell.