Robocop
- Ocean - 1987
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To be honest, if you're
reading this, you've probably already got a copy of Robocop lying around
somewhere. Everyone and their dog, cat wife, husband, sons and daughters
bought this game when it first came out in 1987. Hell, even my grandmother
bought a copy. Grabbing a firm hold of the movie's coat-tails, it was dragged
straight to the Number One slot in the charts, where it stayed for twenty
weeks. Even two years later, it was still hanging around in the top twenty.
But did it deserve to be there? How many other old, successful games have turned out, upon later inspection, to be, well crap? |
| Robocop is not crap. Taking its cue from the arcade behemoth (now reduced to just another MAME game), Mike Lamb created an eight-way scrolling shoot-'em-up which outplays just about everything. Scrolling is smooth and fast, and movement is totally glitch-free. The graphics are clear and crisp, with the monochrome Robocop stomping around the streets of Detroit blasting the perps out of existence. The variety of bad guys is admittedly not great; whereas in the arcade original you could face men in jetpacks, for instance, or fixed gun turrets that would quickly fill the screen with bullets, on the humble Spec we are limited to guys with guns and guys with chainsaws (and, of course, ED 209), although what is there is beautifully animated. Certain scenes are disappointing, too ED 209, for example, is about as scary as a daytrip to Wigan, while in the arcade he was a huge, no, make that heeyooge set of sprites, that actually walked. And ED roared at you in the arcade, too. |
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Despite its graphical shortcomings,
this version of Robocop is still better than the arcade. (And I know, 'cos
I've got both, hee hee. Er, purely for reviewing purposes, you understand.
There's no need for the ISDA to pay me any visits at dawn. Ahem.) When
you play Spectrum Robocop, you're not playing a game. You are Robocop.
When a bunch of perps runs at you from all sides, with a bit of practice
you'll be able to kill them all before they can get off a shot.
It's not all wandering the streets, of course. In now-traditional film licence style, there are a number of alternative levels. Level Two, for instance, gives you an Op Wolf style view of a crim and his female hostage in a recreation of a situation Robo faces early in the film (memorable for a remarkable shot through the hostage's skirt and into the bad guy), and Level Four is a simple puzzle game The Photofit Section. In a marvellous test of eyesight you have to run through a selection of facial features, matching them to the image on-screen of the person who killed you (thus allowing you to become Robocop). But most of the time you'll be doing what Robocop does best walking around and killing people en masse. |
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The sound effects are, to
be honest, poor a bit of white noise for gunfire and that's it. There's
some cool sampled speech at the start of the game, as Robo runs through
his Prime Directives, and a reasonable attempt at 'argh!' when you get
killed. But Ocean have taken a very minimalist approach with sound perhaps
the speech took up too much memory?
The music, on the other hand, more than makes up for every deficiency in the game. It's so good that I start the game up on occasion purely to listen to the title track. It's incredible just what can be done with the AY chip just three channels of sound produce what is still one of the best game soundtracks ever made. The in-game music is also extremely good (Spook Fact: The Ariston company nicked the main in-game tune to sell washing machines in a TV ad during the early nineties. At least, I think it was washing machines. I saw the ad purely as an opportunity to listen to the Robocop music without loading the game.), although not quite as good as that title track. |
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The Robocop game has been
converted to just about all of the major formats, from the Spectrum through
to the Megadrive and SNES (and, yes, the Amstrad too). Being a bit of a
fan of the franchise (I was one of the seven people who actually liked
the TV series, and I own a BB gun that's a replica of Robo's Beretta Auto
9), I've played most of them and own quite a few. The Gameboy version looks
almost identical to the Speccy one unsurprising, since they share very
similar processors. There are gameplay variations, however. On the GB Robo
can suddenly jump (with no animation it looks and feels terrible) and
the difficulty level has increased. One of the complaints about the Spectrum
version was that it was very, very easy. Compared to the GB version, though,
knitting with spaghetti is a fun and rewarding pursuit.
Of all of the versions I've played, including the arcade, the only one I still come back to with a smile on my face is the Spectrum one. It's totally unoriginal, it's a simplistic platform shooter, but it does what it does with such style and panache it's impossible not to recognise the genius behind its creation. |
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