 Sssssmmmmnestrak. I like when games take risks and try something a little outside the box and it's even better when it's a licensed game like Mission Impossible of all things. This one was developed by Konami and released in September 1990 which might seem odd since the original TV show aired in the late 60s and early 70s, but this game is actually based on the revival that continued the series for a few seasons starting in 1988 And most importantly, it once again featured Jim Phelps, played by Peter Graves, and you don't need to read his biography to know that he went to the University of Minnesota. Anyway, you start up the game, and you're given a message detailing your impossible mission, rescuing Dr. O and his secretary from the Evil Sinister 7 terrorist group. To do that, you sashay around a top-down overworld setting, strutting your stuff, taking out bad guys, talking to civilians for clues, and generally just wandering around until you find what you're looking for, even if you don't know you're looking for it. Seriously, I love how these dudes walk. It's like every character can only walk like Zoolander. Yeah, that's not suspicious or anything. As you're gallivanting around town, bad guys will recognize you, shouting YOU with such anger that they'll suddenly move twice as fast, and you gotta take them out. You can't just kill anyone and everyone, though. There are civilians wandering around too, and if you take just one out, that character is finished, and you gotta move ahead in the game with just the other two characters. And yeah, the three headshots at the bottom indicate that there's three different characters you can rotate between, each with three different health meters, so you pretty much get three lives to get through four different overworld maps. The different characters is where this game stands out a bit. You just press start and use the d-pad to switch at any time. There's Max Hart, the guy on the left, equipped with bombs that you can plant, Grant Collier is the guy in the middle, and he's got sleeping gas to knock out enemies, and Nicholas Black can disguise himself to avoid enemies. Max is the slowest since he's carrying the most firepower, Grant is the fastest with the most limited attack, and Nicholas is the most balanced of the three. Although really, to me, the three headshots make your playable characters look more like Brian James, Ricardo Tubbs, and Bono. The structure of this game is like a cross between Metal Gear, GI Joe, and an adventure game. Combat always has to be approached with caution, you collect clues from random folks about where to go, all while flipping between three different characters with different abilities. To give you an idea of how this game works, the first map has you starting in Moscow, where you wander around visiting various places with one bartender telling you to head to the alley, and another guy saying you need a pass to get through a certain door. But what's kind of interesting is that Konami took the extra step to randomly generate where you get that pass. Sometimes he'll say left, and sometimes he'll say it's up and to the right, and sometimes you don't need that clue at all and you'll just stumble into getting the pass. Sometimes to proceed you get puzzles like this one to get through this door. You select the number based on the different sounds it makes when you select it. And yeah, you just keep milling about and figuring out what to do and how to do it, piecing together clues from civilians while hoping not to die. Normally on the NES that sounds like it could be a disaster, but this game keeps things simple enough that it's actually pretty approachable and a decent playthrough. I'm probably overstating the adventure game clue aspect since it's a pretty minor part of the game once you get past the first map, but I still liked it for an NES game anyway. The three different guys you can flip through is also well done in that each of their special weapons are always very useful. What holds Mission Impossible back, however, is that this game is, uh, kind of impossible. Imagine that. The difficulty here is laughable at times. I already pointed out that enemies speed way up when you're pointed out, but maybe worst of all is this game's weird sense of geometry. The top down viewpoint leads to some strange angles where you can't hit certain enemies unless you actually get them to move, and the only way to do that is to get into their line of fire, and when you get hit you take a ton of damage, and it's only about three or four hits per character and you're done. Thankfully there's unlimited continues and a password system that's mercifully only four characters long. The action also gets broken up a couple times with, uh, a boat race and downhill skiing. Sure, why not. They're both extremely short segments only lasting about a minute or so, but hey, at least it comes with music that sounds like it came straight out of the original Ninja Turtles NES game. So yeah, if you like somewhat non-linear adventure games on the NES, Mission Impossible is what you're looking for. The difficulty is brutal, especially some of the boss fights, and the enemy types get pretty monotonous and annoying, but I appreciate the approach to make this more of a thinking person's action game. A run and gun this is not, you gotta be careful with everything you do in this game, and it's executed well enough that it makes your patience worth it. Well, except for those enemies that charge at you with shields and shove you into things, those guys can go straight to hell. But all the usual Konami stylings of the time are here, the graphics look good enough for NES, the music is fantastic, and using your three characters and special weapons is pretty fun. Yeah, it's a bit limited and shows its age and the difficulty can get ridiculous, but I'd still recommend Mission Impossible for NES. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.