IM3 New features

Though aimed to be a seamless continuation of the original two C64 games in style and gameplay, IM3 includes many new features. Here are some of them.

Our agent (a young clone of the now old Agent 4125) not only can crouch - as in IM2 - but can finally roll down on the floor to slip under obstacles and floating robots. It is rumored that he can also swim (another not so surprising ability for an agent, uh?).

The first two games had only vertical elevators but in IM3 the space station features a couple of horizontal elevators and a diagonal one.

Similarly, excluding IM2025, the previous games only had single screen rooms: IM3 features some rooms which are twice high or wide than the regular ones, with horizontal or vertical scrolling. 

Since now, no threat had been reported in the corridors of both the original underground stronghold and the eight towers; this time, instead, even the corridors are no longer a safe place to rest and think about the remaining time and the solution of the taxing puzzles, because it is rumored that, progressing in the game, a special white floating robotic ball appears to hunt you down sucking precious time. In the further levels it has been reported by other agents that energy barriers appear and move against unwanted intruders. 

Compared to the black floating ball of the first Impossible Mission, the white ball haunting the space station corridors in IM3 is a more direct reference to the legendary unsetting "Rover" of the 1967 British TV "spy-fi" series The Prisoner.

More innovative elements that revamp the gameplay inside the rooms are switchable treadmills, switchable energy barriers, teleporters, moving ceilings, rooms filled by water, hidden security lasers only visible with infrared goggles, poisonous gas, freezed chambers, movable crates, gravity inversion and zero-g rooms.

Another useful innovation that will affect gameplay itself is a save / load system, missing in the original two C64 missions: IM3, in fact, is quite longer and saving game status becomes a priority.