Impossible Mission is a Commodore 64 staple. I only learned of its existence in the Japanese market within the past couple of months. This is for the PC=8801mkIISR. One particular thing caught my eye, on the cover of the box the protagonist was depicted as a female instead of the usual gentleman.

Sure enough, the in-game protagonist was also female! What a wild decision, perhaps it was on the heels of the revelation that Samus from Metroid was female and they sensed a market demand. She looks a little awkwardly slumped over when she's at rest, but her movement is bold and confident-looking.

Besides that, the game is the same in concept, but there are definitely graphical differences, and you have to get used to the movement. The timings, height, and width of jumping are different enough that you'll notice during game play.

The PC-8801mkIISR was a major overhaul of the PC-8801mkII. Instead of a static 8-color palette, it's 8 colors out of a palette of 512, selectable on each screen. The other gigantic feature-add is FM sound. But does Impossible Mission even have music to speak of? Not really. It's mostly ambient noises and the sounds of robots zapping. Except this one room! The tones of the computer system are clearly generated with the FM sound. It took me so long to remember how to do this! I kept thinking I had to follow the same order, but it's lowest to highest tones.

Speaking of sound, it does include the iconic spoken intro, "Another visitor... stay a while, stay forever!" Indeed, I have never won the game, never even come close, I always stay forever.

Watching the distinct jump, I kept catching the tiniest white blip. Surely, they didn't humiliate the Impossible Mission woman by giving her a panty-shot, did they? Oh yes they did! It looks minuscule when you watch the jump in action, but if you do a rapid-shot photo session and look at just the right (wrong?) frame, you see it's a good 8 pixels or so dedicated to her underpants.