Jumping All Around

I’ve groused about this before, but I do get it. When developers were adapting live-action movies down to 8-bit consoles it was hard for them to get all the details of a film conveyed properly in game form. Not everyone wanted to make a full, top-down action RPG that tried to work as many elements and plot points of the film into their game (like Willow). Many movies didn’t lend themselves well to that treatment, and developers often had (and still have) deadlines they had to meet to get product out the door. You make the game you can make in the time available, and if it isn’t truly true to the movie, well, you just hope the kids that get these games don’t care.

There really isn’t any other explanation for the mess that is RoboCop 2 on the NES (and also Game Boy). This game is a disaster by any measure, and not just because it barely has anything to do with the film it’s adapting. It does have RoboCop, and a villain named Caine, and the drug Nuke makes an appearance, but if you compared this game side by side with the movie you’d be hard pressed to know that this was actually a related experience. Couple that with absolutely horrendous level design and punishing game play and you have yourself a recipe for not only one of the worst film-to-game adaptations I’ve ever seen, but one of the worst games period.

RoboCop 2, of course, focuses on our titular hero, the mechanical defender of Detroit. RoboCop gets sent out onto the streets to deal with thugs and collect Nuke, the drug that’s making waves all over the city. Nuke is controlled by Caine and RoboCop, over the course of the first half of the game, works his way through said streets, as well as various warehouses, on a mission to eventually reach Caine and defeat him. Caine is bad, so you should go kill… we mean, arrest him, whatever it takes.

Once that job is done, then the robots at OCP start malfunctioning. OCP really wants to get a second defender of the city out there, so they keep trying to build various new RoboCops. None of them work, and the brains of these robots scatter (quite literally, which is just silly). But even after RoboCop collects the brains, and more Nuke, and makes his way through the OCP facilities, there’s still one more problem to solve. The one successful RoboCop 2 has gone haywire and RoboCop has to go in and defeat it. Destroy the robotic beast at all costs before it wrecks all of Detroit.

Very loosely, you can kind of see a bare nod towards the plot of the film. Of course, that’s only if you squint and turn your head right. In reality, RoboCop 2 is a collect-a-thon platformer where your job is to get from one end of the stage as fast as you can, only stopping to get any Nuke you can and rescue (or save) any one that’s around and willing. The construction of the game is very barebones, encouraging you to collect these items so they improve your points… although if you really wanted you could just breeze through, ignoring everything, and getting to the end as fast as you can. Collecting items is great for points, but whatever time you have left on the clock is the primary metric by which you gain health back.

Yes, you don’t automatically get a health refill back to full at the end of each stage. Technically there is no “full”. You start with 20 health but if you’re good at the game you can just keep collecting more and more as you progress. Of course, that only counts if you never die, and the game really wants you to die. There are open pits everywere in the game, along with plenty of instant death traps that come out of nowhere. Getting through a stage cleanly and quickly is nice since you get more health back, but it also doesn’t mean much when the stages actively murder you within seconds of you arriving.

RoboCop 2 is a ridiculously tough game. It’s cruel and punishing, with stuff coming at you regularly trying to kill you. Often you’ll have to just bite it and soak damage because the developers didn’t give you any way around it otherwise. Run out of health, you’re dead. Get crushed by a trap, also dead. Fall in a pit, totally dead. And every death sends you back to the start of the stage (or back to where you last spawned after a bonus room) to do it all over again. And again. And again, because you’re going to keep dying.

There are bonus stages, one in each main level of the game. These act as puzzle reprieves from the main game. Some of these are just platforming puzzles, and if you fail them you go back to where you entered, no harm and no foul. There are some that are sliding puzzles, some that are shooting sections, and some that are code number solving puzzles. I wouldn’t call any of these things engaging, more padded time wasters, but I honestly had more fun with any of these sections than I did the meat of the game. The main levels are horrible. The puzzle sections aren’t special but they’re at least competent.

A lot of what makes this game feel so unplayable is that the controls are just terrible. Robo feels weirdly slippy in the game, like all of Detroit is covered in a sheen of ice. It takes him a bit of a run up to get moving, but then he cruises. Trying to stop, though, takes a bit of sliding, even after a jump. And you’re going to be jumping a lot since the meat of these stages are platforming puzzles requiring so much jumping to get from place to place. For a dude that’s made mostly of metal and has to weigh a ton, the game expects RoboCop to be in the air a lot. It’s ridiculous.

And then, weirdly, all of this is thrown out the window for the last section of the game. When you finally reach RoboCop 2 for the big confrontation, it’s in a one-on-one arena that gets rid of all the rules on lives and health and removes all platforming. It’s like the fight becomes a Wily Capsule battle, with the villain in place of Wily and RoboCop taking position as Mega ManIn 1987, Capcom released Mega Man on the NES, a game featuring a blue robot that fought other robots and took their powers (so that he could then fight other robots with those powers, and on, and on). The series went on to release over 50 games in 30 years and become one of the most famous gaming franchises in the world.. You’re on one side of the screen, the boss on the other, and you fire away at it, avoiding its various projectile attacks until you’ve done enough damage to make it explode. There are three of these fights, back-to-back-to-back, and then once complete the game just ends with a single credits screen. And that’s it.

Now, if you had a Game Boy you could play a version of this game for that hand held. The port isn’t exactly one-to-one as levels were changed and tricks and traps were rearranged. It also features an ED-209 fight in place of one section of the end boss battle. I appreciated that. What I didn’t appreciate were controls that were somehow even less responsive, enemies that were harder to avoid due to the smaller screen real estate, and so much slow down due to the overstuffed Game Boy hardware. I think the development team tried to translate this game as best as they could to the smaller hardware, and I respect that, but it still sucks to play. In fact, I think it’s even more hateful than the NES game, all things considered.

I hated my time in this game (both versions of it). This is a painfully unfun, absolutely tragic experience. Start to finish, this game wants you dead and it doesn’t have any concern for your feelings on the matter. It’s a mean, nasty, terrible experience and you’re better off playing anything else rather than RoboCop 2. I pity any kid that got this game from their parents thinking they were going to get a fun experience from their new NES (or Game Boy) cart. They did not, guaranteed.