Remember that Taco Bell Tek-Kids Flash-Ops game? There were 3 more games in the series. Thanks ever so much to Maxx Marketing, the publisher, as well as their distributor, Yum! Brands, Inc. for graciously furnishing me with the remaining 3 games. It’s a heavy responsibility but I shall fulfill my duty to play through them and preserve their essential statistics for all time via MobyGames. Plus, I want to see that bonus game.

This episode of Tek-Kids Flash-Ops is titled Mission: Aqua Zone. It seems Dr. Havok is back to his old tricks (to be fair, since this is #1 in the quartet, this would be Dr. Havok’s inaugural outing). This time he has an underwater sub that doubles as a weapons factory catering to rogue nations. However, the mortal sin being perpetrated by this leviathan is that it is polluting hundreds of square miles of pristine ocean blue (nautical miles? The difference is undoubtedly important).

I can just tell that all of these games are going to have some kind of environmental message. This somewhat reminds me of some really cheesy Star Wars stories I read some years ago. Each of 6 stories between 2 books was a flagrant allegory for some environmental cause here on earth. I made it a game to figure out as soon as I could in each story what the message was going to be: Save the whales, save the rainforests, etc. Along those same lines, I will try to guess the environmental terror Dr. Havok plans to spread in the remaining 2 missions, Data Island and Sky Fortress. My wager is that the latter is pumping raw pollution into the atmosphere but I’m a little fuzzier on the former. When I think of an island, I think of water, but he’s already polluting the ocean in this adventure. The “data” part of the title may indicate that he’s polluting the internet somehow from some virtual island.

I digress. When I see the instruction screen it looks precisely the same as the one for Polar Mission, thus, I expect it to feature precisely the same gameplay. Wrong. It’s actually considerably tougher:

In addition to only moving left and right, you can also move up and down. However, there are essentially two things you’re controlling with the same set of cursor keys: Your swimmer and the target. They move in opposite directions and it’s quite difficult to keep them straight. It’s a good thing this all takes place in shallow water– that makes things more graphically interesting.