Drake’s “One Dance”. Wet Wet Wet’s “Love is All Around”. Closest to 1989, Bryan Adams’ “Everything I Do, I Do It for You”. Those are the songs to have spent 15, or in the last case 16, weeks at #1 in the UK chart. And none of them can match up to Robocop. I can’t say precisely how many weeks it spent at #1 in Gallup’s all formats games chart, but its run there spans five months’ issues of Computer & Video Games. It is by at least that one flawed measure the most successful game I will cover in the entirety of this project. And it’s terrible.
Searching out contemporary coverage for clues and reading the review of Robocop in Zzap!64 is an odd experience. The commentary from Gordo and Maff is mostly picking at negatives, but then there’s a ‘never mind that, the game’s really good’. Where does that come from? Outside pressure and expectations? Either way, unexplained and unexamined assumptions abound. The underlying implication appears that pulling off a game which is well-presented and gives a little of the atmosphere of a loved film is the pinnacle of possibility for a strand of commercial games.
In Robocop, you control Robocop in a side-on 2D world, slowly walking, jumping and shooting straight ahead, diagonally or up. You walk past city backgrounds rendered with a kind of blank thoroughness in the closest thing to realism the available computing resources can offer. You encounter people on the street, or hanging from windows, shooting at you, and you try to shoot them before they shoot you. And that’s it. That’s the game. The C64 version has enemies even more static than the Amstrad one, but there’s not a big difference. Platoon and Commando and Green Beret all offered much more in the way of personality and variation within their main gameplay. Robocop just exudes a total lack of imagination.
If you get good enough at the limited available dodging and shooting techniques you get rewarded with some slightly different interludes but generally more of the same. The difficulty level could be described as punishing, but is maybe better described by pointing to the late-game level where all the graphics are glitched out, an embarrassment protected by the insane patience required to ever see that part. Robocop is a relentless dull grind. You get a digitised voice saying “Robocop!” each time you start a new game, though, so yay?
[taken from video by DerSchmu]
The Commodore 64 version offers one additional horror, which is the colour palette chosen, specifically the brown skin tone given to enemies. As a result you are forced into the role of an armoured cop walking around Detroit shooting every Black or Brown person he sees, no questions asked. It almost steps into being bracing commentary, if everything else about the game didn’t so thoroughly step away from the possibility of setting out to say anything about anything. As it is, it’s just one more indication of indifference. If this were to be all games can offer, it would be a stale prospect indeed.
