RoboCop 3 (SNES) Playthrough
356A playthrough of Ocean's 1992 license-based platformer for the Super Nintendo, RoboCop 3.
Released about a month before the movie hit theatres in the US, RoboCop 3 put you in the titanium shoes of the non-Peter Weller version of cyborg cop Alex Murphy as he yet again tries to save Old Detroit from the machinations of the corrupt OCP Corporation.
There were a few different games released for RoboCop 3, and the SNES version is pretty much the same game as what was released on the Sega Genesis/Master System/Game Gear. The ones on PCs and NES (https://youtu.be/JFIKtdU8DBc) are entirely different games.
I remember seeing screenshots in magazines of RoboCop 3 before it was released, and it looked to be an pretty impressive attempt to carry on the legacy of Data East's RoboCop arcade games. The character sprites were huge, and the top-down mode 7 shoot 'em up stages were clearly designed to impress.
In practice, however, Ocean shows us what a problem prioritizing fancy screenshots can be for gameplay. The controls are fairly kludgy - nobody expects RoboCop to run and jump like Mario, but when a slow-as-molasses RoboCop takes up so much room on the screen, he just ends up becoming a bullet sponge.
The enemies tend to swarm, and they'll eagerly gang up on you and shoot in patterns that you can't avoid unless you edge the screen just far enough to see them without triggering their attacks. There isn't any invincibility window following a hit, either, so if you find yourself on top of an enemy (those stupid grunting rats in stage 3, anyone?), you'll find your life bar empty before you ever even realize that you're taking damage. The extremely limited ammo supply doesn't help much either - if you fire a bit too freely, or if you choose the wrong weapon to use throughout a stage, you can easily find yourself in an untenable situation with the stage's boss.
The game is brutal thanks to some frustrating design decisions and thorough memorization is all but required to make progress. (Who though that making it so that you could shoot and destroy the power-ups was a good idea?!) But, like many older games, things are the same every time you play, and once you know it, you can breeze through it without much problem. It just takes some dedication to get there.
RoboCop 3 isn't all bad. The graphics are nice enough: the animation is a bit stiff and awkward and the backgrounds can be repetitive, but the mode 7 flying stages are smooth and surprisingly well-detailed, and the digitized still shots still look great. The music is also reasonably good. The tunes aren't on par with what you'll find in the NES RoboCop games, but they get the job done and the samples are all of good quality.
If you want to give it a go, I'd recommend the SNES version since the controls are better - the extra buttons on the SNES pad are put to good use here - and the game looks quite a bit nicer on the SNES than it did on the Genesis. To its credit, though, the Genesis version does have a few more digitized photo backgrounds than the SNES game and it's the only version of the game to feature nifty digitized speech samples. You know, for just a bit more of that movie-license magic and flair.
For as lopsided as the whole thing is, there is something oddly likeable about RoboCop 3. It irritated me to no end, but I felt quite satisfied at having learned it well enough to stomp it.
Ocean subjected us to games far worse than this over the years, but if you really want to be wowed by a game based on RoboCop 3, you ought to check out the Dos/Amiga version for its (at the time) state-of-the-art 3D graphics and "open-world" gameplay.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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