Mission: Impossible – Operation Surma (2003 – Game Boy Advance)

Mission: Impossible – Operation Surma came out in 2003 on PS2, alongside a very different and much worse version on Game Boy Advance. It seems unfair to put them into the same slide, given they’re made by entirely different developers.

By this point, Infogrames had begun wearing the ill-fitting skin of the long-dead Atari, and like so many games of the era, had two lots of developers make two versions of a game with the same name. For the GBA, it was M4 Ltd, a small UK developer that seemingly only made GBA games based on existing licenses. So alongside Antz World Sportz and Mary-Kate and Ashley: Winner’s Circle, they also created the handheld incarnation of the movie tie-in.

Set between the events of Mission: Impossibles 2 and III, Operation Surma finds our espionaging heroes trying to stop the evil Surma group from releasing a virus called ICEWORM which can disable any type of security system. As you’d expect, you go all over the world in your efforts, although on the GBA version you do this in painfully static 2D, rather than in the PS2 version’s 3D action.

This version got an absolute kicking by the press, with Cheat Code Central stating, “I would have had more fun gluing spray-painted macaroni to my ass than playing Mission Impossible: Operation Surma on the GBA.”