You are Terminated!

While the SNES version of RoboCop versus the Terminator was the first out of the gate, there were a fleet of games that all came out under the same name, and they blanketed the then-current video game market with carts. Nintendo’s 16-bit system might have been the one everyone first noticed, but a far superior version of the game was incoming… just as soon as its development cycle was finished. And no, we’re not talking about the Master System and Game Gear versions, although technically those came out next. Instead, we’re looking at the Genesis edition, developed by Virgin Games.

Strictly speaking the Master System, Game Gear, and Genesis games are all basically the same. They have the same level layouts, the same basic enemies and bosses, the same weapons. The titles were developed in conjunction, based on Virgin’s design notes (as overseen by game director John Botti), but developed by different teams – Virgin directly for the Genesis edition and NMS Software for the others. But while they’re all basically the same, there is no doubt that the Genesis got the best version of that game… if you were willing to wait an extra five months for it.

Naturally, the Genesis exceeds the other editions on graphics and sound. The Genesis game is better sounding and better looking, using the full power of Sega’s 16-bit hardware to deliver a very handsome package for players. It’s slickly designed, smoothly animated, and the music provided by the console’s sound chip is stunningly good. While I’m normally not a fan of the Genesis’s sound engine, it does suit the Terminator franchise very well. This is one of those instances where the heavy, crunchy synths from the Genesis actually enhance and compliment the license of the game.

With that said, the game isn’t not perfect, and once you get past the slick package and good music, what you have to confront is a fairly shallow shooter experience. I wouldn’t call it anywhere near as bad as the SNES version of RoboCop versus the Terminator, but this Genesis game doesn’t hit the lofty ambitions of the development duo of John Botti and Scott Duckett. They wanted to make a game that had all the thrills and excitement of 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. title, especially Contra III: The Alien Wars or Contra: Hard Corps, but they weren’t really able to get the final package there no matter how much they tried.

In basic construction, RoboCop versus the Terminator on the Genesis is a run-and-gun shooter. In fact, if you only looked at it via screenshots, you might even think the Genesis and SNES versions were the same game. They have similar graphics, similar concepts, similar styles to their gameplay. You walk, jump, climb, and slide along beams, all while firing with a variety of guns to take out hordes of gang members and terminators. You are the lone hero, the RoboCop, the sole defender of humanity against the machines from the future.

Honestly, the running and gunning does feel better and more interesting on the Genesis, and this is due to a couple of key differences from the SNES. First, RoboCop feels a little more lithe and responsive. His animations are faster, his movement smoother, and his shooting more precise. On the SNES version you moved rather sluggishly, and the very idea of trying to make this heavy, metal cyborg, the RoboCop, actually run and jump seemed ludicrous. He just couldn’t move that way over there… but he can here, and it makes for a more fun and more dynamic play experience.

Additionally, the game allows you to switch weapons on the fly. On the SNES that just meant switching between your base pistol or whatever special weapon you had on you (so, basically, you never switched back to your pistol unless you died). Stealing a page from Contra, though, the Genesis versions gives you two weapons slots that can both carry special weapons, and you can use the huge variety of guns in the game to your advantage. There’s a spread shot, a weird wave shot, slowly moving bombs, fast and deadly lasers from a rifle, a laser pistol as well, and more. You’re going to see a lot of guns, and finding the right combination will be key to making it through the waves upon waves of enemies, all of whom will be blasting at you from all directions, blanketing the screen with projectiles.

What’s nice is that many of the weapons can be used to take out the projectiles from enemies as well as the enemies themselves. Your projectiles will block their projectiles, so you just need the right weapons, and good aim, to handle this. The spread shot is really nice for this, giving you more protection than many other weapons, while also providing a wide range of fire. For killing enemies themselves, though, the laser weapons seemed to be the most powerful, melting terminators in just a couple of shots. Finding the right mix of weapons really was key, and once I had the two I liked best, I tried as hard as I could to keep them.

Of note, though, is that when you die you lose whatever weapon is active upon your respawn. This makes you picky about what weapon to use when close to death, but, as I discovered, there’s also a bit of a glitch to this. Your death animation is long, but you still have active control of your gun menu while dying. Since the weapon switches upon your respawn, you can use the gun you like right up until death, switch off of it while RoboCop is thrashing on the ground, and then only lose your backup (or, if you’re on the base pistol at this point for your second weapon, nothing at all). It’s a bit of a cheat, yes, but for some boss fights this was the only way I was getting through them at all.

The game is tough, with a ton of enemies and projectiles going all over the place. The design team’s goal was to make a Contra-like experience, and they more or less nailed that. You have a health bar, so you don’t suffer from one-hit kills, but the later levels can get pretty brutal even with a ton of hidden lives and health replenishing items scattered around. Thankfully, it really is a ton, and you could have upwards of 50 lives by the time you play through the whole game, if you get lucky with drops and go searching out all the secrets. You will need them, though, especially in the final boss fight as that can be a brutal slog and you’ll lose a ton of those lives by the time it’s all said and done. I started that encounter in the high forties and was down in the teens before I finished off SkyNet’s core and got the ending of the game.

Thing was that I almost didn’t bother. I had a lot of fun with the game in the first couple of stages, enjoying the smoothness of the gameplay and the basic run-and-gun thrills. At a certain point, though, the gameplay loop wears thin. There’s no variety to the game, with every stage being a basic maze platforming area that you traverse, shooting at anything that moves. There are only a handful of enemies, and these are crammed into ten or so stages, all with the same basic requirements. It’s a lot of the same, over and over, and it becomes stale by the end of it all.

In trying to make a Contra-style experience, the designers missed one of the key factors that Konami clearly understood: you need to break up the gameplay or the whole experience gets boring. Contra had side-scrolling stages as well as behind-the-back fortress levels. Contra III: The Alien Wars featured a variety of stages, from side-scrollers to top down maps, to climbing levels and missile levels and a bunch of other stuff. Contra: Hard Corps. broke up its gameplay with vehicle levels and a lot of strange bosses. RoboCop versus the Terminator doesn’t have any of that. It’s all the same kind of run-and-gun stages over and over without a change in sights. Hell, even the SNES version had one vehicle stage. That stage sucked, but it had it. The Genesis version needed some alternate gameplay modes just to give us variety and keep things from getting stale.

Hell, this version doesn’t even have cutscenes. You get a text scroll at the beginning of the game explaining the whole plot (from the terminators coming to the past, to RoboCop getting plugged into SkyNet and going to the future) before playing the whole game, and then there’s a text scroll at the ends saying, “good job saving the future.” You go from fighting thugs in Detroit to suddenly fighting in the future without any break in between and it feels so awkward. We needed stuff to break up the game into better chunks and the Genesis title never gives us that. It hurts the overall experience even when its run-and-gun basic gameplay is honestly fun.

The lack of variety hurts the game but it doesn’t ruin it. If the SNES version was a five-out-of-ten, this genesis version is a solid seven. It could have been better, with story intercut into the game and some variety to the stages, but the basics of the game are sound. I have a feeling the designers had to make what they could as solid as possible and then shove it out the door, so they focused on the side-scrolling and chucked everything else, including cutscenes. It is what it is.

If I had gotten this game as a kid I’d likely have enjoyed it. It’s a solid shooter for the Genesis, and it comports itself well enough. But you can see all the little things that could have made this game even better, and the fact that either the designers didn’t see it or they didn’t have the time to do it right hurts the experience. I liked this game but I absolutely didn’t love it. With the right care, this could have been a real stunner.