RoboCop (NES) Playthrough
823A playthrough of Data East's 1989 license-based action game for the NES, RoboCop.
To nobody's surprise, Paul Veerhoven's brilliant, blood-drenched 1987 sci-fi blockbuster spawned a wide range of successful video game adaptations. Data East's popular 1988 arcade game (https://youtu.be/H3anFdSMn1o ) led the charge, and it was followed by a glut Ocean-developed releases for 8 and 16-bit computer platforms before finally landing on Nintendo's console in late 1989.
RoboCop for the NES isn't a port of one of Ocean's games, though. Created by Sakata SAS, the company behind most of Data East's 8-bit console games, this is an original game loosely based on the arcade original.
You play as Alex Murphy, a Detroit cop turned crime-fighting cyborg after being gunned down in the line of duty, and you're out for revenge. Over the course of six side-scrolling action stages, it's RoboCop's job to root out the corruption plaguing the city while upholding his prime directives:
1. Serve the public trust
2. Protect the innocent
3. Uphold the law
And he does this by brutally murdering everything that crosses his path. Each area is filled with thugs to punch and shoot your way through, and you'll eventually come face-to-face with the likes of drug czar and ghetto lord Clarence Boddicker, as well as OCP's ED209.
The gameplay is simple and fairly straightforward, but it does several things to differentiate itself from the typical NES platformer. RoboCop can't jump, so dodging attacks is rarely a viable option - brute force is the best way to go in most cases - but he does have a block that momentarily nullifies all damage. He can't rely on this too often, however, since it'll put a drain on his power source which acts as an in-game timer, and if his battery goes dead mid-mission, it's instant game over.
At first, RoboCop comes across as an extraordinarily difficult and unforgiving game. You get just one life for each of your three continues, your life gauge isn't refilled between stages, and special weapon drops are rare.
But the deck isn't stacked entirely against you. With practice, you'll figure out strategies that can reliably get you past each roadblock while minimizing damage. Inching forward to avoid being trapped by enemies from both sides, stocking up on and rationing ammo for crucial moments, and perhaps most importantly, learning how to balance blocking with power draw are all things that will make the mission go more smoothly. If you have the patience to stick with it, in time, RoboCop actually becomes quite an easy game to conquer. As a kid I thoroughly enjoyed figuring it all out, and I think it's still quite a bit of fun to work through now.
The game does a nice job of mimicking the look of the arcade game (remember, this is a mid-gen NES game!), and the music is good even though it repeats way too often. The controls are solid, too, though trying to figure out how to walk down a staircase can be super aggravating. The trick is to position RoboCop's back foot over the top step before hitting the down button.
It's not quite on the level of Konami and Capcom's NES movie tie-ins, but if you're looking to test your chops, RoboCop is a satisfying old-school romp.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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