Previous Next

Robocop, fresh from his debut as a coin-op star, now appears in his own computer game, based around parts of the coin-op and the movie, but not a direct conversion of either.

Robocop is a good example of a movie licence that has successfully managed to capture the basic elements of the movie. It's fast paced, it's violent and it's great.

Follow our hero as he makes his way through nine levels of action from the routine patrolling of the streets to the discovery of one of his murderers (I'm not going into detail about the plot - see the movie). Tracking and identifying his assailant leads him to discover the true whereabouts of his real murderer in a drugs factory which then, well, let me take you through it slowly.

The first level has you on patrol in the streets of Detroit. The crime rate is a little high in the area. As you walk along, more and more bad guys appear, some in windows, some on ground level, all armed. You have to take them out as fast as possible. As you walk along, and this happens on all but three of the levels, some of the bad guys drop items. These can be anything from baby food bottles to replenish your energy level, which you'll need (you only get one life), to weapons of a more powerful nature. These range from armour-piercing shells to three-way fire.

When you reach the end of the level, you hear a cry for help from a nearby alleyway. Treading your way in a metallic sort of fashion, you come across a mugger holding a woman in front of him like a shield. The idea here is to shoot the man, but not the girl. The man moves randomly left and right, and you have to hit him about twenty times by moving a crosshair over the small amounts of his body that show. Hit the girl and you lose energy. Run out of time and the guy kills the girl.

The third level has you back on the beat again, only this time it's a little harder. As you get to the end of the level, you are met by a motorcyclist outside a gas station. Kill the cyclist, and you load in the second of the three loads.

Level four is where you learn who your murderer was. On the left is a photofit picture of Mr Motorbike. You have to build up an identical picture for the police computer. A bit of the rogue's face rotates for a brief time, and you have to press fire when the correct one comes up. You get three attempts. Put the face together in the alloted time, and it's off to the drugs factory. This is a four-way scrolling tower, the idea being to get to the top, and then down again. Baddies come from all four directions as well, and this is where it starts getting hard. It's here you find Clarence Boddiker, your murderer, he informs you that the man to go for is Dick Jones, the number two at OCP, the computer firm that now runs the police department.

Off you go to see Dick, who proceeds to disarm you with a little deterrent by the name of Directive Four. What that means is that you can't attack a member of OCP, which results in you almost shutting down and losing your weapon. Then you are faced with ED 209, a huge lumbering metal beast, the original design for Robocop. The only way to destroy it is to get close enough to punch its gun inwards, effectively making it blow itself up.

Then you've got to get out of OCP tower, kill Clarence Boddiker and save the President of OCP. All in a day's work.

All this fits into three loads, the good thing being that once you load in the second or third load, you don't have to go back to the start of the game, only the start of the load.

The graphics are as good as they could be on the C64. What that means is that the sprites, though small, are quite well defined and colourful. Robocop himself is amazingly well animated, especially when he climbs steps, though he does mince slightly, rather than stride purposefully [You're so butch Tony! - Ed].

Sound, however, is not as good as it could have been. The sound effects are flat and dull, and the tunes are far from pleasant. The only really good thing about the sound is the speech at the start which basically states "Robocop".

The game plays quite well, though there are one or two irritants. The first is the jump control. For one thing, it's pointless, and, as it consists of up and fire, you lose vital manoeuvrability for a few seconds when firing upwards. The other gripe is that it's incredibly hard to get down stairs. I have spent precious seconds wandering around at the top of a flight of stairs trying to line myself up perfectly so that down-left on the joystick will make me walk down the stairs kneeling down and pointing my gun at the floor.

Robocop is a very good game. Sadly, believe it or not, it doesn't rank anywhere near the Spectrum 128 version, which has much better graphics and sound, and even a bit where you hear Robo read out his prime directives. There's no reason why they couldn't have done that on the C64.