Man in Machine Versus Machine in Man

There’s nothing entertainment businesses love more than a crossover. One popular character can sell product, but two popular characters can sell even more. Spider-man and Venom, Mario and Sonic, DC and Marvel. If you can put two popular properties together, the suits reason, then you’ll sell twice as much of any one thing. Maybe even more. Because nerds love to have two great tastes that taste great together, right? Print it, ship it, it’s a great idea! Who cares if it’s actually good.

Sometimes crossover can be great. The first three phases of the Marvel Cinematic UniverseWhen it first began in 2008 with a little film called Iron Man no one suspected the empire that would follow. Superhero movies in the past, especially those not featuring either Batman or Superman, were usually terrible. And yet, Iron Man would lead to a long series of successful films, launching the most successful cinema brand in history: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. can certainly provide that evidence. But sometimes they’re really bad, such as in the case of all the terrible SpidermanSure, DC Comics has Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, but among the most popular superheroes stands a guy from Marvel Comics, a younger hero dressed in red and blue who shoots webs and sticks to walls. Introduced in the 1960s, Spider-Man has been a constant presence in comics and more, featured in movies regularly since his big screen debut in 2002. and VenomSpun out from a "What If?" story in Marvel Comics, this black suit variant of Spider-man became his own character, and eventually became almost as popular as the web-head himself. crossover games that LJN made in the early 1990s. You want these things to be good because it has your favorite characters in them, but you also know how often these things are just cheap cash grabs meant to capitalize on a couple of great characters without any real thought being put in on how to make these things actually good. So often they turn out bad, and then you’re sad because you wasted money on them.

Such is the case for RoboCop Versus the Terminator, a series of games released on various consoles in 1993 and 1994. The games were (loosely) based on a four-issue crossover comic written by Frank Miller and published by Dark Horse in 1992. Miller loved RoboCop, even writing screenplays for both RoboCop 2 and RoboCop 3 (although both were mangled during their tortured productions). But where Miller’s comic crossover was a success, the video games were anything but. They may have sold well (although hard numbers at this point, three decades later, are difficult to come by) but all you have to do is play them to see just how bad they could truly be.

We start with the SNES version, developed by Interplay and published by Virgin Interactive. In the game, RoboCop is on patrol when he encounters Flo, a soldier from the future who has come back specifically to kill the police cyborg. Apparently sometime in the future, RoboCop would get captured by machines sent by SkyNet so that he could be reprogrammed and forced to ensure SkyNet comes online. If that happened, the Earth would get blasted by nuclear weapons and the war with the machines would be on.

Wanting to stop that from happening, RoboCop heads to the OCP research facility where he’s learned some unusual cyborgs have appeared. He blasts the machines to bits, but when he interfaces with OCP’s systems he realizes it was all a trap. SkyNet takes over his body, uses his mind to come alive, and the Earth is blasted by the machines. Now, waking up in the future, RoboCop frees himself of SkyNet’s influence, rebuilds his body, and heads out into the wastes to find SkyNet’s central core and destroy it so that humanity might be able to finally rebuild.

RoboCop Versus the Terminator is a run-and-gun platform shooter. In it you play as RoboCop as he walks, jumps, climbs, and blasts his way through multiple stages. These span from the slums of Detroit to the OCP facilities, and then into the future, through machine-infested complexes, into SkyNet’s main base, and to the core itself. And all the while you play as RoboCop, doing his thing, committing so much gun-based violence on anything that stands in his way.

Conceptually I liked RoboCop Versus the Terminator. I found the story interesting and compelling. RoboCop having to battle machines from the future so that he can save the present is an interesting idea, if a little basic, but the twist that he fails and ends up in the future, having to fight the machines, was a solid one. I found the story interesting enough that I wanted to play through the game so I could see how it ends. Unlike so many other licensed games of this era, where the story is secondary to the action, if it’s thought of at all, at least this game had story enough to keep my attention.

At the same time, the game is actually pretty decent looking. RoboCop is big and chunky, with a nicely detailed, well animated set of sprites. The terminators, too, are well drawn and fluidly animated. There’s a lot of enemies, and a fair number of things to see, and while most of the game takes place in blasted out Detroit, blasted out future Earth, or inside machine facilities, it never looked bad or boring. It’s an attractive enough game that, if I were just looking at screenshots or short gameplay clips, I’d actually think it was a good game.

Playing it, though, is another matter. RoboCop Versus the Terminator is a very boring game. It has a lot of action, yes, and there are a ton of stages, but that doesn’t make the game interesting. It’s a very basic, very repetitive game, with the same gameplay loop happening over and over in every stage (save one) by the time you’ve played through the first act of the game and been warped to the future you’ve essentially seen all that the game has to offer. You just have to play through 35 more minutes of it to get to the end.

One issue is that the shooting mechanics are brainless. At any time you have two guns to use, your basic pistol or one of a number of machine and plasma guns you’ll find throughout the game. Your pistol is pretty crappy; once you find an upgrade you won’t go back to the pistol until you die. The upgrades, though, aren’t very interesting. They all amount to faster firing rates and more firepower, but there’s nothing creative about them. They each shoot forward and do more damage. It’s not like a ContraStarted by Konami in 1988 the run-n-gun platform series Contra was, for a time, one of the flagship franchises for the company. game where the different guns do different things. It’s just more power, that’s it.

On top of that, all you’re doing is moving one direction or another, shooting and walking. You don’t really have to think most of the time, just hold down fire and navigate the levels. If there were more variety to the enemies, instead of just various thugs or terminators and some flying enemies to bother you, the shooting could be more strategic. But your best move in any situation is to hold down fire and move forward. It never really gets any more complex than that throughout the whole game.

RoboCop Versus the Terminator would, frankly, be incredibly short if it were just a linear experience, but Interplay did the thing I hate most: it made long, dumb, looping maze stages that make no sense. You’ll start at the left of the screen and you’ll have to navigate your way through the stage, without any clue where you’re going or what the reasoning is for the level layout. Maybe you’re going to the bottom left. Maybe the upper right. You won’t know until you’ve gone through all of it, getting lost two or three times per level because nothing makes any sense at all. It’s padding for the sake of padding, bad level design to paper over the fact that the designers didn’t actually know how to make interesting stages. I despise this.

The only time the game does anything different is when it puts you in a vehicle to drive across the wastes to get to the SkyNet mainframe. Here you roll around, shooting terminators from your vehicle until you’ve killed enough the stage ends. It’s different, but it’s also brainless, and I absolutely wouldn’t call it “fun”. I’m not sure why this one stage is in the game except, maybe, to put screenshots of it on the back of the game box and in magazines. “Look, we have variety,” it seems to say, even if that’s really just a lie.

I want to like RoboCop Versus the Terminator for the SNES because I find the story interesting. Here, finally, we have a TerminatorIs it a series about a future nuclear war and the survivors of the aftermath? Is it a series of chase movies set in the present day? Is it a series about time travel? That fact is that the Terminator series is all of those concepts. The mash-up of genres and ideas shouldn't work, but the films have proven adept at mixing into a heady series unlike any other. property that doesn’t rely on a hero from the future going back to protect the leader of the future resistance. This was different, it was intriguing. I like different. Sadly the actual game itself doesn’t rise to the occasion. It wastes a good story on a bad game, and that might be more unforgivable than anything else about this title. If you were unlucky enough to get duped into picking up this game back in the day, I’m sorry.