RoboCop 2 (NES) Playthrough
452A playthrough of Data East's 1991 license-based platformer for the NES, Robocop 2.
Following about a year after the film's theatrical release, the NES adaptation of Robocop 2 ended up being the second, and final, Robocop game for the 8-bit console to bear the Data East name.
The first RoboCop NES game (https://youtu.be/rhi8FK47UBU) was a loose reinterpretation of the hit Data East arcade game created by the company's long-time go-to developer SAS Sakata. It had its flaws, but it was solid, fun game that was generally well-received.
Fast-forward two years to the release of RoboCop 2 and the picture was somewhat less rosy. For fans of the original game, it was apparent from the instant you plugged the cartridge in and hit the power button that something had changed.
Something big.
Why did the music sound like it was coming from an English 8-bit micro? Why was RoboCop teal and sparkly? Why was the game a generic platformer featuring an ice-skating cyborg that could jump six feet straight up in the air from a standstill?
Then you died twenty times in the span of five minutes and turned it off in a fit of frustration...but then you came back to it a while later and picked up on an important detail on the first screen that you hadn't noticed the first time around.
"GAME DESIGN © 1990 OCEAN SOFTWARE"
Yeah, Data East published it, but game was created by Painting by Numbers under contract with Ocean, a company known for its scummy business practices, a few good computer games, and a whole lot of shoddy, half-assed ones. A game by Ocean, whether it was developed in-house or otherwise, usually looked and sounded good no matter the platform it was running on, but the gameplay was rarely up to the standards that console gamers had become accustomed to. Of course, you'd expect there to be a chasm in quality between a computer game that went for $10-15 brand new and an NES cart priced at $40+.
I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.
The Commodore 64 version of Robocop 2 sold for about $12 when it was released in 1990. The NES game, which is virtually identical to the C64 one save for the inclusion of in-game music and slightly nicer graphics, went for $45.
I don't know how C64 fans felt about Robocop 2, but no matter how good it might've been, a game developed to sell at a $12 price point is not going to deliver the level of quality one would expect when paying nearly four times that amount.
So, big surprise. Robocop 2 is crap. The controls are some of the worst I've come across in a platformer: RoboCop slides around like his feet have been slathered in Vaseline, he drops like a stone when he jumps, there's a lot of input lag, and the collision detection is a cruel joke when you're being forced to punch something. Then there's the endless parade of cheap traps that'll kill you in a single hit, the game's refusal to tell you what requirements need to be met to finish a level until you're already at the end, the multitude of hidden "bonus" areas that you're required to visit in order to progress, and the slider puzzles.
Did anyone ever like slider puzzles? Like, at all? Everytime I come across one in a video game, I feel like I'm being punished. I know I can't be the only one.
The graphics are kind of cool. They're extremely garish and the backdrops tend to obscure important details, but the style is unique for an NES game and the animation is fairly smooth. The music is alright, but the blippy arpeggiated chords start to grate on the ears after awhile.
If you're hard up for a platformer and have already exhausted the NES's line-up of A, B, and C-listers, then maybe you'll find something here to justify the effort. Everyone else is going to be left unsatisfied and disappointed by Alex Murphy's failure to serve the public trust this time around.
Do yourself a favor and play the arcade game instead.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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