REVIEW: Mission Impossible 1996/1997, Nintendo 64
	By: Ocean/Infogrames Type: 'Spy sim' Players: 1 Difficulty: Varying

Amazing but true, Infogrames has once claimed in a press interview that Mission: Impossible was "probably more anticipated than Zelda!". Yeah, right. Either they were desperately trying to get someone, -anyone- interrested in this game, or they were just plain out of their minds. Both theories seem plausible when you look at the finished game. Considering that Infogrames spent several years working on this, it's amazing how many things have gone hopelessly wrong without any of the coders noticing. Parole, they've spent their three years of development time reading comics in the programming offices?

 
(left) You dirty bastard, that's all you ever think of. , We -know- you've been hiding XXX magazines under your bed!.jpg (right)

Looks and sounds are what you always base your first impression of a game on. In this case, your first impression will be as if you've run into a stone drunk Freddy Kreuger. Okay, so it doesn't look -completely- awful, but there's a lot wrong with it. The characters look pretty hilarious for one thing; rough, jagged polygon models with abominably deformed (and solidly frozen) faces that move with all the grace and fluidity of rubber Godzilla suits on slow motion. To be fair, there has been some effort in the design of detailed costumes, and your main blokey Ethan moves in a convincing enough manner, but all of this is ruined by the fact that every other character is hokey to the max. Based on the below-par looks of the characters alone, it becomes simply impossible to take this game seriously. The rest of the looks are decent, but unspectacular. Your average ho-hum collection of slightly too fogged outdoor locations (who always seem to be in places that are overly cold and grey), and the nice enough indoor locations, with one or two more detailed rooms to brighten things up a bit. It's okay, but there's nothing special to really notice. One or two locations do try to look more impressive and succeed quite well, but it's not enough to lift the overall dreary tone of the looks.

Blam! Thwack! Bokko!

It comes as no suprise that ol' Tom Cruise didn't want to have his face used in the game. You wouldn't want -your- face in a game that looks like this either. So Ocean have instead come up with their own mug for the hero. And he looks like a cross between Tony Danza and Lino Ventura. His forehead is marked by enormous eyebrows and a rather offbeat hairdo, while his face is frozen into a frowning pout with an skull-drilling devilish stare to his eyes. And you've got to look at that for the entire game. At least he dresses well enough.

Sounds are even more of a humdrum affiar, hence I'll pass over them quickly. The thumpety-thump tunes are instantly forgettable, the sound effects are decent enough, and the bits of speech from Ethan himself sound pretty badly muffled. Then again, he only sais such pointless things as "yeah, way to go!" (a secret agent, talking like that?) at regular intervals, so that's no big loss.

 
(left) Damn, I lost at hop-skotch -again-!, Duh, let's try using the door, Ethan (right)

As for the gameplay, that's a big hit-or-miss thing, with a quite a few more misses than hits. The game keeps switching from more action-packed all out shooting and running levels to "stealthy" levels which require you to walk around and talk to ugly-looking people, occasionally picking up object A and taking it to room B, or punching some sod to death when nobody's looking. The action-oriented levels sometimes work quite well, with good doses of rapid reflexes and sneaky shooting required to make it through alive. They have their flaws, however, in the sense that they're a bit too repetitive. The same gimmick or tricky thing is repeated a few times too often to keep you really interested. In some levels, this routine structure becomes an utter plague. Some other levels tax your brainwork and sense of timing
a little more than others, with puzzles that are not exactly genial, but nice enough. Ethan's control system has a few leaks in it as well, but nothing that can't be surmounted. The action levels are overall none too shabby, but the "talky" levels are a severe annoyance. For the simple reason that not one thrilling thing happens in them; your mission objectives are immediately laid out for you most of the time, leaving very little room for own initiative or exploration, and in the end, walking from A to B with only one or two things to pick up or kill occasionally gets very, very dull (even when you need to make sure nobody finds out that you've just killed blokey X). And then there are also a few levels that adopt a completely different style, trying to mix some shoot'em up or delicate puzzle manoeuvring into the fray, but they do their thing so poorly it all looks a bit pants. The game tries to do lots of different things, but succeeds at very little of them.

Etahn's best costume in the game, surely

Of course, the idea of the painful talky levels is to establish a spy-style feel of intrigue and sleuthery. Only, with the hilariously campy looks and animation, it falls flat on it's face with a loud thwack noise. Some examples of hystericaly funny happenings: Ethan walks into a guard's little office and tells him "I'm looking for my dog". He then kills the guard. The dog's not there. Another one is when Ethan, lounging around in some kind of embassy ends up meeting a Fidel Castro lookalike. After some yattering, Ethan smacks FidelCastrox to death and uses his amazing Cutey Honey-inspired "facemaker" device to morph himself into a carbon copy of the now dead Castro-man. He does this by stretching his aching shoulders. It looks absolutely hysterical. The utterly ridiculous shootout scene on board a passenger train, or the bit where a defenseless lady gets clobbered to death in the loo also rank high as classic moments of Mission: Impossible comedy (and I haven't even mentioned the screamingly funny death routines for Ethan or the clunky dialogue). No way is anyone going to believe this bunch of imbeciles are really top secret worldwide organisations operating against sinister conspiracies.

Ethan looks for a place to pee without anyone seeing him

So the point of a subtle and sneaky spy game is sort of ruined. It might have helped f there had been a good spy storyline in there. Well, there is -some- kind of storyline in there (someone has lost their pet Siberian mole and everyone is trying to catch it, I think) but it's not exactly edge-of-your-seat stuff. Basically, a bit of text at the start of each level tries to give an excuse for what will happen on-screen. We don't want to read through an average spy novel, we just want to get stuck in the action. It would have worked much better if the plot was laid out before you while you progressed through the levels, rather than explained hurriedly in-between levels (some dreadfully hokey cut-scenes don't help either). This way, the sotryline never draws you in or even moderately intrigues you. You walk around a level, completing dull objectives as the on-screen text tells you, after which you're presented with a story about how the top secret guest list for the Chinese embassador's tea party has just exploded. It might help if you've seen the Mission: Impossible movie, as this game seems to stick with that plot and re-uses some scenes from the film. Only this looks more like a Marx Brothers interpretation of some sort.

So, is there any reason left to give Mission: Impossible a chance? Hardly. If you really, really dig the movie, this might be worth a look. Rent it for a weekend to chuckle your head off at the silly moments if you must, but otherwise you'd better forget this ever existed. And with Perfect Dark around, Infogrames will probably hope you -do- forget about this embarassingly shoddy game. Especially after boasting that this below-par shambles was more anticipated than Zelda. - Toasty 65%

[Key to the reviewing system]