1 Serron: Oh my gosh. The final minigame is Impossible Mission. Another classic Commodore 64 game, from 1984.
2 Serron: We have to collect 36 puzzle pieces hidden in a fiendishly difficult maze of trapped rooms patrolled by lethal robots, to assemble a 9-letter password.
3 Iki Piki: Oh lawks, this is going to take forever.
3 Serron: No, definitely not. It can’t take that long.
4 Iki Piki: Well, that’s a relief.
4 Serron: There’s a six hour time limit before we die!

Impossible Mission is, as Serron describes, a classic video game from 1984.

The player controlled a person searching an evil villain's hideout complex for 36 puzzle pieces that combine to make a key, allowing access to the villain's secret room to defeat him. The puzzle pieces were hidden in furniture objects that decorated 32 rooms, each room being multi-level with four levels of platforms. You had to pause at each furniture item for a few seconds of real time in order to complete searching it. This was made more difficult by the fact that the rooms were also populated with hostile robots, who would patrol and try to kill you. So often you had to interrupt your search, move around to distract the robots, and then return to the same furniture to continue the search. Your character could also jump over some of the holes in the platforms, fall down to lower levels, or ride lift platforms to go up or down. The rooms were connected by corridors leading to eight different lift shafts, which gave access to other rooms.

Also in the rooms were computer terminals (shown at top left in the panels of this comic), which let you perform various tasks including deactivating the robots in the room for a short period of time (to allow you to reach some of the better guarded bits of furniture), look up a map of what rooms and lift shafts you had explored so far, and rearrange your collected puzzle pieces to try to combine them into the parts of the required key.

When your character died, your game didn't end - you just respawned and kept going, but this cost you a penalty of 10 minutes of time. You had to complete the game within six hours of real time (minus any 10-minute penalties) to win.

I played this game quite a lot when it came out. But I never managed to win it. I was just never very good at these sorts of games. But it was great fun.

One of the more memorable features of the game was that it included a very early example of digitised speech. When you loaded up the game, you were dropped into the complex to begin, and an ominous voice intoned from your speakers (as reproduced in the previous comic of this theme):

Another visitor. Stay a while... Stay forever!

I distinctly remember the first time I ever heard this. I'd never heard a computer make a voice before, so I wasn't expecting anything like this. I loaded up the brand new game and it started... and that voice rang out.

It freaked me out. A real, "Holy crap!", almost change your underwear moment. It was terrifying.