Extropia’s Retro-Gaming: ‘Rescue Mission’

EXTROPIA’S RETRO-GAMING

‘RESCUE MISSION’

‘Rescue Mission’ was released in 1987 for the Sega Master System. As its name suggests, the game was centred around rescuing wounded soldiers. In each level (which included five different landscapes, such as a jungle and a swamp) there was a railway track that took a long and winding route through the landscape. Upon this track there rode a cart carrying medics. Whenever the cart reached a fallen soldier it stopped so that the medics could administer first aid and get the soldier to safety.

At this point you are probably thinking that the player’s job was to take control of that cart and guide it through hostile territory. But, actually, the player’s role was to lay down suppressive fire in order to hold the enemy back while the medics did their jobs. You see, ‘Rescue Mission’ was not played with a regular joypad. This was a light gun game.

That in itself made this game something of a novelty, as there were very few games that supported this peripheral. It was also pretty novel in its style. I don’t know about you, but if I heard of a light gun game involving a cart riding around a track, I would assume there would be a first-person perspective with my point of view being that of somebody riding the cart. A literal on-rails experience, if you will. But ‘Rescue Cart’ afforded the player a top-down view of the action. As the cart made its convoluted way through the landscape, enemy soldiers would run in from all sides, blasting away with their machine guns. If they hit the cart once, they slowed it down. A second hit reduced its speed to a crawl, and a third hit killed everyone aboard.

You with your light gun had to stop them with fast and accurate shooting. You didn’t just have a supply of bullets with which to defend the medics, though. Each time a soldier was rescued he dropped a special package which was either a protector (temporary immunity for the medics) a first-aid kit (removes one point of damage) or a smart-bomb (destroys everything on the screen). At the end of each level, bonus points were rewarded for the number of medics and soldiers rescued.

This was a fast and furious game, particularly when ground troops were joined by soldiers flying around on jet packs and fast-moving special forces soldiers who were capable of destroying the cart with one shot. The game would have been impossibly hard had it used the joypad, but like I said this was played with the light gun. Even given the greater precision and speed with which you can point and shoot a gun rather than move a cursor around the screen with a D-pad, this was still a very frenetic game.

It was also one of the best games released that supported the Master System’s lightgun. Admittedly it did not have a lot of competition and its appeal did wear off after a while, but if back in the late 80s you were after an intense test of your reactions and aiming ability, ‘Rescue Mission’ would have served you well.

Thanks to Sega for the images.