Star Road

I kicked off this series with one of the most epic Playstation games, one that changed my gaming life. So where do we go from there?

How about a mediocre third-person spy adventure? This is Mission: Impossible.

This game, originally developed as a PC game before they pivoted to N64, had a troubled gestation. The original development team at Ocean was based in my hometown of San Jose, California but unfortunately they couldn’t quite put it together. When France-based Infogrames bought Ocean, they fired everyone on the original team and moved development to a team in Lyon. The game at that point was barely playable and ran at only 4 fps!

Although, in the end, the finished product doesn’t run much better. The PS1 port, released about a year after the N64 version, has FMV cutscenes, voice acting, different lighting and effects, and new sound effects and music. It even has Dolby Surround sound. However, even in the indoor scenes, the frame rate frequently drops below 15.

This is where emulation saves the day. Duckstation has a feature that lets you overclock the emulated CPU. It doesn’t work often; in fact, it breaks most games. Some games have seemingly no effect, while many will simply run at a faster speed. But a few games actually utilize the extra processing power to run better. Mission: Impossible has a 30fps limiter that it normally never reaches; with the CPU overclocked, it sits at a solid 30 fps in all situations.

Another cool emulation tool, the Widescreen Hack, works perfectly here. Not only does it work well for this game in general, correctly rendering the extra visuals in the expanded area, but then there’s the UI choices by the developers: all of the text and UI icons in this game are extremely narrow. It looks like they were always intended to be stretched out.

Skipping ahead to the ending for a brief moment, look at all the original-sized icons on the 4:3 display, which is how the game was intended to be played. Not only does the phone look too skinny, but the aiming reticle and radar display are squished too! Strangely, they look a lot better when stretched to the wide frame.

Where the N64 version is a bit dull visually, the PS1 version really cranks up the contrast and saturation for a dramatic presentation.

Most of the dialog is pretty bland…

…but there are some funny quips now and then.

There are a few lines that feel like they were written and translated by the French team, though.

That’s your partner, Candice. It was very odd how some characters pronounce her name like it rhymes with “miss”, but others pronounce it like it rhymes with “fleece”. Classic crappy voice acting scenario that was common with these older games; people recorded all their lines on their own, so sometimes there isn’t a consensus on how odd words and names are pronounced.

The dialog subtitles appear at the top third of the screen, which is sometimes nice.

Most of the time though, it just goes right across the characters’ faces, which is a bit annoying. I wonder if this was done to (literally) mask the lack of face animation.

One very cool aspect of this game is the game over sequences. Most games just give you a generic fade-to-black or similar if you do something that gives you a Game Over; Mission: Impossible has several bespoke “bad endings” that show what happens if you mess up whatever you’re doing.

Neat angle; you can’t do this in a live action movie because you would see the camera in the reflection of the mirror.

Little bit of a smoke effect going on here which is apparently much more than the N64 got in this scene.

Another funny “bad ending”, if you try to escape the infirmary without distracting the staff.

The heliport area gave me some Metal Gear Solid vibes, but it’s useful to point out that the release of the N64 version of this game actually predates MGS by a few months.

This game is only “based on” the Mission: Impossible film from 1996, but of course they had to put in this iconic sequence.

Unfortunately, this is actually one of the most frustrating parts of the game. Within a time limit, you have to swing to one side to activate the card reader, then to the other to use the computer. It’s a simple concept, but the clunky controls conspire to make this a very frustrating scene.

The FMV’s are pretty unimpressive, even for the time; most of them are essentially just a slightly higher quality version of the gameplay, recorded and then encoded with a ton of data compression.

There are a couple moments where they threw in some fake bokeh to make it more cinematic, which I thought was kinda funny.

At this point you have to destroy the electromagnetic jammer (by throwing it on the ground apparently..?) and then get in the helicopter to escape.

Ethan I said in the helicopter! Man, what is with the spy movie trope of escaping on a helicopter by holding onto the skids as it takes off?

I always get a kick out of seeing real world locations in these older games, especially places I’ve actually been to.

This is actually a pretty fun sequence, where you switch to one of Ethan’s teammates to protect him from above as a sniper.

Another one of the “bad endings”; if you mess up what you’re supposed to do on the train, the bomb gets detonated.

What is this even supposed to mean without the typo?

You can’t have a spy story without the “running down a train on the roof” trope.

More translation fun: you have to use ze rocket launching gun to fend off attacking helicopters and rival agents driving next to the train. This was a pretty fun scene.

Another person getting away by jumping to the skids of a helicopter? And flying a helicopter inside a tunnel??

More MGS vibes: footprints in the snow and avoiding search lights.

The ending level is pretty entertaining. You pilot a gunship in first person view, and are tasked with blowing up everything you see as you escape on a river. The explosion effects are pretty good! Here you can also see one of the only places where Widescreen Hack falls short in this game; the widescreen view lets you see the end of the cannons, which (as you would expect) weren’t originally rendered to be much bigger than what you could see on the screen.

Once you do that you get to watch a few more ugly FMV’s and then…you’re done! If you were able to beat it on the standard “Possible” mode, now it’s time to give it a chance on the ultra-hard “Impossible” mode. I gave up early on and switched on the cheats for infinite health and ammo; you need to be a real expert/masochist to beat this without cheats, especially on Impossible mode.

Overall it was an enjoyable late 90’s experience, but it doesn’t hold up to modern standards at all. The auto aim and first person aim are rough, the enemy AI doesn’t make much sense, and making progress can be frustrating; the game requires you to look at your Objectives list and figure out what it wants you to do, and it gives you almost zero hints along the way. Every once in a while you’ll do something and Ethan gives you a hint with a voiceover, but that’s rare and the full extent of it. There isn’t even a map! Thankfully I was able to play it overclocked at 30 fps, because it would have been a truly painful experience at the original sub-15 frames per second.

During the game I kept thinking about Goldeneye 007 and Metal Gear Solid, but ultimately this game reminds me of Syphon Filter the most; I think it’s time to pull that out and see how it compares.