The Running Man Longplay (C64) [50 FPS]
52Developed by Emerald Software and published by Grandslam in 1989.
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Based on another of the big Arnold Schwarzenegger movies from the late 1980's, The Running Man is a side-scrolling beat 'em up from Emerald Software (who also developed the C64 conversion of Vigilante).
The game puts the player in the muscle-bound spandex bodysuit of Ben Richards, wrongly convicted of murdering civilians in food riots in a dystopian future and forced to compete in the highest rated (and most bloodthirsty) game show on television.
Each level sees the player take on each of the films Stalkers in a fight to the death. This sounds much more exciting than it really is; apart from the Stalker and a couple of dogs, each level is complete empty and the player simply moves to the right until they find the Stalker.
Combat is similarly pathetic. Richards can punch or kick and that's all; some of the stages contain a single weapon to pick up, but all this does is exchange the reach of the punch (and uses the same animation. The actual weapons are poorly drawn; one looks like a bent fork and another like a crucifix!
None of the Stalkers are particularly difficult to beat, although Buzz-Saw gave me some trouble until I realised you can simple crawl underneath him as he swings his chainsaw! In fact, the only enemy to cause any real trouble is Fireball, purely because he uses his jet-pack after getting hit and becomes untouchable until he lands again, thus making this a protracted and terribly boring fight.
A bonus stage features between each stage, requiring the player to play a tile matching puzzle, swapping tiles on a hexagonal grid in order to make both left and right grids identical. In all fairness, this isn't a bad concept and is based on the uplink scene from the film where Weiss attempts to break into the network satellite.
Whilst some of the sprites are reasonably animated (and I do say that grudgingly), the graphics are pretty terrible. Everything is painted using some gaudy, unrealistic palette and the scenery is terribly blocky. The Running Man certainly won't win any awards for design and the animation of Damon Killian glitch-twerking his away across the screen after getting kicked at the end of the game is hilarious.
The tape version of the game (which is what I owned) had a spirit-crushingly terrible multi-load, and the disk version isn't much better. Given that each stage is so small and empty, it's surprising that each stage has to be loaded separately.
As with Vigilante, The Running Man certainly shows off the power of the C64's SID chip and the creativity of the composer (this is, of course, sarcasm).
Sprite collision is reasonably predictable is perhaps the one redeeming feature about this game, but it's scant praise when everything else is so distinctly poor.
Games based on move tie-ins have always been met with cynicism from gamers and critics alike and The Running Man certainly did little to change matters.
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