Rescue: The Embassy Mission

NES cover

"Rescue: The Embassy Mission" is a NES game released in 1989 in Japan 1990 in the U.S. and 1991 in Europe.
This is actually the NES edition of a game called "Hostages" (1989, multiple computers).
The title was changed to "Hostage: Rescue Mission" in the U.S. and "Operation Jupiter" in France.

Mike making his way to his sniping position

The premise is simple: Terrorists hold hostages at an embassy and the player, leading a team of anti-terrorists must rescue the hostages and take out the terrorists.

Mike sniping

The game is essentially split up in to four distinct parts:
First, four snipers (Mike, Steve, and Jumbo) must move in to position, while avoiding searchlights by walking, crawling, jumping and hiding. As long as one of them makes it to their position alive the game continues.
Second, the snipers takes out terrorists by shooting through the windows.
Third, three people (Ron, Dick, and Kemco) rappel from the roof (actually you are free to change between this part and the second freely).
Fourth, when one of the people rappeling from the roof enters trhough a window they start moving trough the embassy to shoot terrorists and resucue hostages.

Hostages (ZX Spectrum)
(For comparison)

There are three difficulty settings: Lieutenant, Captain, and Commander.
Essentially they change how fast the terrorists move and how easy it is to get killed.

Ron reppeling down the building and entering trough a window 

There are three missions: Training, Target, Ultimatum, Trigger, and Jupiter.
Essentially theese are the same, but with increasing difficulty. The time limit gets tighter and the number of terrorists increase. The training missions does not have any hostages and doesn't give you a rating when you complete the game.

In practice this gives the option of 15 different difficulty settings.

No matter the settings there will always be three hostages (except in Training).

Map showing starting position and sniping position.

If all of your snipers are killed on the way to their positions it's Game Over, but as long as one survive the game continues. After that you loose the game if all other three characters die. Of course if the time runs out at any point that is also Game Over.

Once the mission is complete you will get a rating, listing what characters in your team was killed and how many of the hostages you accidentally killed.

For a complete victory all hostages and all anti-terrorist must survive.

Hostages (Amiga)
(For comparison)

As fun this game was it was just way too short. Sure there are several difficulty settings, and I don't remember ever clearing Jupiter. But every mission is the same, only increasingly more difficult.
I always cleared the missions on an average of 5-6 minutes, and that's just way too short by any standards.

I do think this game would have been better as part of an anthology of games, or at least if it wasn't sold at full retail price.
But on the other hand the length of the game is really the only real grievance I have with this game.

You can get a used copy in poor quality for around €3.
A brand new is about €50, which is basically the original retail price.