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View Full Version : Game of the Day 2/24/2016: Rescue: The Embassy Mission



celerystalker
02-24-2016, 12:08 AM
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Rescue: The Embassy Mission is a simulation of a SWAT team forced to intervene when terrorists occupy an embassy and take the officials hostage. You control a six man team, and you only have a few minutes to rescue the hostages and eliminate all of the terrorists before things escalate out of control. There are three main action segments to the mission, with a fourth brief section of rappelling down the side of the embassy to gain your point of entry. The time limit is determined by which mission is taken on, and the difficulty is selected by choosing your rank from Lieutenant to Commander.

Your first goal is to get your three snipers into position. Unfortunately, the terrorists are well-prepared, and are sweeping the streets with spotlights, and they're ready to gun you down. You must crawl, roll, run, and duck into windows, hedges, and doorways to avoid detection. One slip up, and you're a corpse lying face-down on the sidewalk. Make it to your perch, though, and you may begin phase 2: sniping.

Should you make it safely, you can have a sniper on three sides of the building, and you may sweep the windows, waiting for silhouettes to sneak into view. Hostages don't move, so should you see a shadowy figure, take your best shot. Your goal here is to take your team and thin the herd in order to clear a path for your three commandos who get dropped on the roof and are poised to infiltrate.

Once you feel you're ready, position your commando on the side of the building of your choice, then begin rappelling down. Don't go to fast or you'll fall. If a silhouette pops up at the window, you can press select and go back to a sniper and take a pot shot. When you're ready, crash in, guns blazing. The last segment plays out like a first person shooter. If you've played Golgo 13, you have an idea of what to expect. On easier difficulties, you have radar that will show all hostages and terrorists, but you get increasingly less intel the higher the difficulty. Rescue the hostages, shoot everyone in green, and you win!

Higher difficulty adds more wrinkles than just radar absence in FPS mode. There are more and faster searchlights, enemies move faster and shoot better, and sniping is more difficult, as the terrorist only appear at windows briefly.

Kemco has always put out neat little games with a cool premise that are littered with little flaws (or big ones), and in this case it's just that there's no real campaign to speak of. Each mission is basically the same, just with increasing difficulty and tighter time limits, offering the same experience, just tougher. Still, the game that's there is a fun one in my book, and I really like the sitting back and sniping. It won't grip anyone for 100 hours, but as a brief little mission from to time, it's pretty cool, and recalls classic PC sims of the era.

Saved any purple-suited ambassadors lately?

Tanooki
02-24-2016, 04:56 PM
I had this way way back in the day, but not for the NES, the PC version. I had the NES one in the later 90s when the PC DOS version gave up wanting to live in a newer environment, didn't like it as much. It's a unique game, not a lot of tolerance for error either. It's cool picking random spots to navigate an overhead/side scrolling scenario to dodge terrorist spotlights to get the best vantage points for a raid on the building they're holding. Inside it's a weird mix of a pre-FPS and almost like a roguelike doing room to room searches and then rapidly popping someone before they get you. Yet outside, my favorite, you can setup many snipers on your team and hollow out some heads or chests through the windows along the entire side of a building for a time. It has lots of solid variation to keep it interesting, but again, it' comes off fairly cheap as it isn't very forgiving for screw ups.

Gameguy
02-25-2016, 12:44 AM
I could never rappel successfully down the side of the building into a window. This game is on my crap list like Total Recall or Action 52.

celerystalker
02-25-2016, 12:52 AM
I could never rappel successfully down the side of the building into a window. This game is on my crap list like Total Recall or Action 52.

If you ever decide to give it another chance, you can repel successfully by pressing Down for about 1 second, then tap Up to stop. Repeat until you are directly over a window, then press A to crash through.

Tanooki
02-25-2016, 09:57 AM
Rappelling pissed me off more than enough times back then, but I eventually figured it out and unless you slip up as again the game isn't very forgiving it's pretty fun. Just not very fun when you go splat and slide down the wall from many floors up. Going in to a room with terrorists, and quickly pulling out your gun to drop them is rewarding.