ROBOCOP 3 (NES)

Today, a game about robots, cops and meddling studio executives with Probe and Ocean’s 1992 NES your-move-creep-em-up RoboCop 3. You know, a game based on the movie where RoboCop can fly and hangs around with children.

Children like this weird-faced, uzi-toting little munchkin. Doesn’t a six-year-old having access to a submachine gun break some kind of law, RoboCop? Do your goddamn job! It’s going to be difficult serving the public trust when you’re using a schoolkid as a shoulder-mounted gun emplacement.
Okay, a confession: I’ve never actually seen RoboCop 3. I’ve heard about it, and somehow the morbid curiosity that made me watch Hellraisers four through eight (nine is apparently where I draw the line) was not strong enough to get me to sit through the family-friendly adventures of the incredible flying robot-cop. From what I’ve read, though, Robocop 3 the game follows the plot of the movie fairly accurately. I’m sure that if anyone can spin gold from RoboCop 3, it’ll be the titans of game development that are Probe and Ocean. I’m sure Ocean were hoping that this would be as big a hit as their home computer ports of RoboCop, but I’m going to guess that it really wasn’t.

The game begin with a call from Anne Lewis, RoboCop’s partner, and she’s in trouble. Not to worry, dealing with trouble is what RoboCop does best and he’s quickly off to to save her. In a car, he’s not flying yet.
I have to say, that’s some nice artwork on Officer Lewis. Well drawn in a very small number of colours, I’m very impressed with it. It’s a look that really shows Probe’s history as a home computer developer, too.

Not so impressive is RoboCop himself, who looks like he’s having real trouble driving his car. I’m having problems parsing which way around the hand that’s holding the steering wheel is supposed to be facing. It’s not terrible-looking, just kind of awkward.

That, erm, that is true, I guess? Things may well go on behind closed doors, although I don’t see what that’s got to do with RoboCop, who spends most of his time on the streets or inside large industrial facilities. I thought it might have been a hint about a secret in the first stage or something, but having investigated thoroughly I think it’s just weird. Also weird is the description of the criminals you’ll be facing as “splatterpunks,” but that’s the kind of weird I can appreciate. Whatever else RoboCop 3’s failings may be, at least it’ll always have the cachet of having used the word “splatterpunk.”

It will come as absolutely no surprise to anybody that RoboCop 3 is a side-scrolling action platformer where RoboCop travels through the city while shooting criminals (sorry, splatterpunks) and jumping over things. That’s what I always think of when I remember RoboCop: the vast amount of jumping he does. In Probe’s defence, they have at least made RoboCop feel very heavy when he jumps, with every landing producing a satisfying thump as he hits the floor.

What else can RoboCop do, besides jumping? Well, he can aim his gun diagonally upwards, which is handy because a lot of enemies pop out of windows to take pot-shots at our hero. You can also switch between two different weapons: a handgun and a missile launcher. You might think that given a choice between a pistol and a rocket launcher your pistol would get less use than Bruce Willis’ hairbrush, but in practice they’re both about as useful as each other – the missiles are more powerful but slower than the pistol’s shots, so they end up killing things at about the same rate. On the plus side, killing a bad guy with the missiles causes them to fly away off the top of the screen rather than exploding in a bloody mess.

One problem with RoboCop 3’s combat is that it can be quite difficult to defeat criminals when they’re right next to you, thanks to their tendency to stand “inside” RoboCop, where his guns cannot reach. This instance was particularly infuriating, because this bad guy ran up behind RoboCop and kicked him right in his big metal arse. This somehow caused RoboCop damage. That does not seem right at all. What’s the point of the hugely expensive and complicated robotification process if you can still feel pain when someone kicks your backside? Did OCP cheap out and use spray-painted plastic instead of titanium alloy when crafting RoboCop’s buttocks? Actually, that sounds like something OCP might do.

The stage ends in extremely anticlimactic fashion as RoboCop reaches a dead end and has to stand around and shoot a certain amount of criminals before the level abruptly ends. Thanks to the combination of RoboCop’s crouching ability and the enemies’ tendency to fire at head height, most of the combat revolves around shoot people in the groin. Is this inspired by the scene in the original movie where RoboCop shoots that guy’s balls off? Honestly, shoot one person in the genitals and you'll never live it down.

Between stages, you’re given the chance to repair RoboCop by using the maintenance tokens you’ve collected. Simply select which part of RoboCop’s body you want fixed and spend your tokens accordingly. Supposedly, having high damage on a body part will cause that part to malfunction. It always seemed to be the legs, in my case, and every now and then RoboCop will be unable to move for a moment or two if his legs aren’t repaired. I’m not sure whether I noticed this more because the way I played the game (badly) meant RoboCop’s legs took all the damage, or if RoboCop’s so stiff and awkward to control even when he’s fully repaired that it’s hard to tell when he’s on the blink. I figured I’d better explain this system to you, because I wouldn’t want you to think that RoboCop spends his between-mission breathers sitting atop the Throne of Justice, presiding over his court as a jester makes jokes that are really going to struggle to get a laugh.

Stage two sees RoboCop fighting his way through a car factory. Why? I don’t know, the game didn’t bother to explain. All it said was that RoboCop’s making his way to the “ultimate conflict,” and as he’s a Jesus Christ analogue I assume that means he’ll be fighting the antichrist at some point. The thing is, according to what I’ve read of RoboCop 3 The Movie’s plot, Anne Lewis is killed at around this point in the movie. The game makes absolutely no mention of this shocking development, presumably convinced that the player’s desire to eliminate crime will be sufficient impetus for them to continue without the waters needing to be muddied with something so trite as vengeance.

This stage adds a lot more platforming into the mix – fussy, miserable platforming that requires a lot of very accurate leaping from a character who’s made of a ton of solid metal and bloody controls like it, too. Fortunately, missing a jump here isn’t instantly fatal. You just loose health while you’re in the goop. No, the insta-death pits come later in the game, so that’s something to look forward to. Amongst its other quirks, RoboCop 3 also has a strange lives / continues system: you have one life, and when RoboCop explodes the “Game Over” screen appears and you go back to the title screen… where you can continue from the start of stage you died on. So, not Game Over, then? Okay, cool.

Suddenly, a ninja appears. That’s generally how ninjas work, I suppose. So, it’s the agile, speedy ninja versus RoboCop, who may be a hero but who is as lithe and nimble as a bin-bag full of microwave ovens. This seems like it would pose a problem for RoboCop, but the ninja seems less interested in stopping our hero and more excited to show off his totally sick flip jumps. It’s understandable that you’d want to showcase your ninja training, even if it does give the this fight the air of a junior school gymnastics performance with RoboCop in the role of the bored father. The ninja somersaults around the place, RoboCop shoots the ninja when the opportunity presents itself and the pair of them chase each other around the arena in this manner until one of them emerges the victor. On to stage three, then.

What? There’s another half of the stage to go, with another ninja fight at the end? I suppose I’d better get on with it, then, starting with shooting this criminal hiding in a pile of tires. Hang on, that exact scenario also happened in Rolling Thunder! Man, I wish I was playing Rolling Thunder, it’s a much better game than RoboCop 3: where Rolling Thunder has precise controls and easily-identifiable enemies with distinct attack patterns and threat levels, RoboCop 3 is a fussy game with enemies that puddle into a generic soup of felonious activity. There’s simply nothing interesting about them. Even the ninjas are boring.

When stage three does finally begin, a few things are different. For one, RoboCop is walking towards a tank. This fact is highlighted by the artillery shells that occasionally come flying across the screen. You can see one at the bottom left of the screen, where I managed to avoid it thanks to the other change: RoboCop can fly now, because he has a jetpack. It might seem like a very un-RoboCop thing to happen, this sudden change from the future of law enforcement to the Rocketeer, but it’s probably the nearest this game gets to being fun. You boost upwards by holding the jump button, RoboCop moves fairly smoothly and it’s a nice change from his usual leaden-footed stomping. It doesn’t alter the gameplay too much, because you still need solid footing to effectively deal with the enemies, but even if it’s little more than being able to do a big jump it’s a welcome addition.

I do like that graffiti down there, because it appears to say “diet.” Like, as a command, perhaps in response to the hefty thud RoboCop makes when he lands from a jump.

Oh, yeah, I should probably mention that RoboCop can upgrade his weapons during each stage by collecting the appropriate items. His pistol starts off firing single shots but can be powered up to three-round bursts – you know, like how RoboCop’s gun works in the movie – and onwards to a three-way spread shot. I think the spread shot is actually less useful than the rapid fire, because it doesn’t put as many bullets out as the rapid fire and the ability to aim diagonally makes part of the spread redundant. As for the missiles, they can be upgraded to homing missiles. “Homing missiles? That sounds great!” I hear you say, but they’re hardly flawless. For starters, they don’t work on some enemies, most notably the ninjas, who emit some kind of jamming field according to the on-screen text. The homing missiles also aren’t that good at homing, and will often fly around in circles a few times before lethargically wandering towards a splatterpunk. Supposedly there are also explosive rockets, but I don’t think I ever managed to upgrade the missiles that far so I’ll have to take the manual’s word for it.

Here’s the tank, well-camouflaged for the urban hellscape of downtown Detroit. Getting close to it is the hard part, because the grenade launcher on the side emits a constant stream of damaging ping-pong balls. Once you get right up to the tank, however, it’s a matter of dealing with all the criminals that pop out of it, as well as their accomplices who run in from the edges of the screen. A simple enough prospect, but there’s one problem: the splatterpunks have learned how to crouch. This makes it almost impossible to avoid their attacks when you’re fighting them on a flat plane (and makes it that much more difficult to snipe their gonads off), so the only real strategy is to kill them all before your health runs out.

Once the tank is dealt with, the stage is over and RoboCop’s jetpack is drained of fuel, regardless of whether you actually used it or not. This causes the game to order RoboCop to “walk back to the OCP tower.” What happened to that car he was driving earlier, huh? Walk back to the tower, I ask you. Is this any way to treat a RoboCop? He’s certainly not likely to win any speed-walking competitions, so the villains’ sinister schemes – whatever the bloody hell they may be – have plenty of time to come to fruition as RoboCop plods his way back to headquarters like a pensioner on his way home from the pub.

It wasn’t kidding, you really do have to walk back through the stage you just completed. As far as I can tell, it’s exactly the same lay-out as last time. Well, that’s one way to avoid having to design new levels, I guess. Most games make you complete the whole thing before you unlock Mirror Mode, but RoboCop 3 is generous enough to give you an early taste.

The only new things to worry about in this stage are these small, unassuming orbs that are scattered around the place like your nan’s throw cushions. They’re actually land mines that will blow up if you touch them. Exploding throw cushions, then. They’re also prone to some completely baffling collision detection, where sometime you can detonate them with your gun but at other times you bullets will pass right through them. It’s especially strange because the hit detection is pretty much okay in the rest of the game, it’s just these bombs that do their own weird thing.

Waiting at the end of the stage (and pacing back and forth) is ED-209, everyone’s favourite badly-programmed murder droid. It’s still his job to defeat RoboCop, despite being terrible at it. Makes sense to me, would you want to be the one to tell ED-209 he’s been made redundant? I thought not. Anyway, ED-209 hangs around the left hand side of the screen and launches many, many projectiles at RoboCop’s general position. This makes it difficult to get a clean shot at ED-209, especially because you have to shoot him in the head, but I managed to find a sweet spot near his feet where I took as little damage as possible while attacking his weak spot. It’s not quite as efficient as luring ED-209 onto some stairs, but it’ll do.

The final stage is about to get underway, but not before RoboCop 3 offers up a lesson in road safety.

You’re in the upper offices of OCP headquarters. There are multiple ninjas. Ignore the ninjas. Not only do ninjas hate not being the centre of attention, but you can’t hurt them anyway. Instead, the entire final stage consists of walking up to this computer terminal and holding up on the d-pad.

If you do that, RoboCop begins decrypting whatever this computer system is supposed to be. Don’t worry about the ninjas, they’ll spend 90 percent of the fight somersaulting around the screen while RoboCop gets to work. That’s right, the climactic encounter of RoboCop 3 involves the player holding a button on the controller and gazing at RoboCop’s arse. I’ve faced off against some truly awful final bosses in my time writing VGJunk, but I think “fiddling with a computer” might be the very worst of them.

With the computer thoroughly hacked, RoboCop flies away with two children. They’re acting as ballast, I think, lest RoboCop accidentally has an Icarus moment. That means RoboCop 3 is over, which is sort of a relief because even though it’s a very short game it still feels like a bit of a slog. Part of that is down to RoboCop himself, because he’s slow and lumpen. On paper, RoboCop feels like he should make a good videogame hero, but he’s not really a good fit for most action games. There must be some way to make playing as RoboCop fun while still feeling like RoboCop – a lightgun game, maybe – but side-scrolling platformers with lots of jumping are not it. On top of that, the swarms of boring enemies that pop up seemingly at random don’t make the gameplay any more engaging, and there’s a lot of annoyance in constantly taking little bits of damage. On the plus side, it doesn’t look bad and the soundtrack is above average, composed as it is by Commodore 64 music legend Jeroen Tel. Plus, you’re playing as RoboCop. There’s still a ten-year-old inside me that will always be excited by that prospect, even if he is flying around and rescuing kids rather than blowing away perps in an extremely gory manner. So, on the whole RoboCop 3 isn’t quite as terrible as I expected, but I would still highly recommend you watch RoboCop instead of playing it. Hell, I think I’d recommend you watch RoboCop 2 over this. At least it has that scene where the failed RoboCop experiment rips its own head off.

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ROBOCOP 2 (ARCADE)

What's six and a half feet tall, only eats baby food and is formed from the grotesque fusion of flesh and technology? That's right, it's the mechanical toddler I've built to help me take over all the adventure playgrounds in the local area, granting me access to a vast supply of valuable wood chippings and discarded ice lolly wrappers. Oh, and RoboCop too, I suppose. Here's Detroit's finest in a 1991 arcade game from Data East: it's RoboCop 2!

Yet another of the big sci-fi / action movie franchises pitches up on VGJunk, and I think RoboCop stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of the Xenomorphs and the Terminators in the fame stakes, if not in the amount of nightmares he brought to little kids. For an emotionless justice dispenser, he's sort of cuddly.

Just in case you've never seen RoboCop, a quick run-down. Police officer Alex Murphy transfers to a new precinct in downtown Detroit only to be brutally shot dead within, like, twenty-five minutes. This is bad for morale down at the station but convenient for Omni Consumer Products, a giant corporation who use Murphy's body to create RoboCop, a cyborg copper designed to be the ultimate lawman. Sadly, OCP flunked out of the same ethics classes as Weyland-Yutani and possibly Satan himself, RoboCop struggles with his human memories, the vice-president of OCP is in league with the criminals that killed Murphy in the first place, a bunch of people get shot and a big robot falls down some stairs. RoboCop saves the day, and perhaps regains some of his humanity.

Then there's the sequel - RoboCop 2, funnily enough - and that's what this particular game is loosely based on. In the movie, OCP try to build an improved model of robot policeman but rather go off-piste at the end when they give it the brain of a psychopathic druggie murderer. Hey, it was the Eighties, big risks for big reward, work hard and play hard, am I right?
There aren't much in the way of cutscenes in this one, so it'll be interesting to see how the game and the movie link together. For now, though, let's start the game and whaddya know? It's RoboCop doing what he does best: facing off against some punks.

The standard arcade-action-game punk, resplendent in their traditional garb of sleeveless leather jackets and brightly-coloured mohawks. Knowing that they don't stand a chance on their own, the punks have allied themselves with the security guards of the city's armoured cars. Look man, it's Old Detroit in the near future, (that is, about 1995,) everyone was on the take!
RoboCop shoots the bad men, because that's what RoboCop does. Sometimes he has mini freak-outs as his lingering humanity flickers through his cyborg brain, sometimes he offers up robotic bon mots like "your move, creep," but on the whole he's all about shooting the bad guys.

That's handy for Data East, because it's a lot easier to make a game about shooting bad guys than it is to make one about a heartfelt examination of the human condition. That's why Transformers: Dark of the Moon has a videogame adaptation and Wild Strawberries doesn't.
So, Data East took the usual route of turning the RoboCop license into a side-scrolling blastathon where RoboCop must make his way through a hundred street gangs' worth of assorted punks, motorcyclists security guards and men in nondescript overalls until he reaches the boss and shoots them, too. It's all simple enough and plays exactly as you'd expect it to, apart from one difference: there are two attack buttons, one to fire to the left and one to fire to the right. Get close to an enemy and you'll grab or punch them instead. It's a pretty decent system, and it's a refreshing change to be able to walk backwards and fire at the same time. Walking and shooting are really the only two strong suits RoboCop has.

And then just when you've gotten used to that, the viewpoint suddenly changes and now Murphy is has wandered into a carnival shooting gallery where the targets are desperate criminals and instead of a teddy bear or a goldfish in a bag the only thing you'll win is justice. Yeah, it's functional if nothing else - move the crosshairs around and press fire when they're over a bad guy, try to avoid their bullets. That's the bit that drags it down - RoboCop weighs about the same as a Ford Fiesta, so diving and dodging aren't really in his repertoire  Wild Guns this ain't, but it's a short section and a pleasing enough diversion.

Back to the mean and sideway-oriented streets, and RoboCop's mission to clean up Detroit is hampered by the appearance of a man with a rocket launcher. Give that goon a medal for a bit of forward thinking - it's not like the criminal element of the city don't know who RoboCop is by now, and still those first punks turned up with medieval battle axes, of all things. Mind you, they can block bullets with those axes so perhaps I shouldn't judge them too harshly.
Actually, that man with the RPG looks sort of familiar...

I'd recognise that green suit anywhere: it's the kacho! Arino from Game Center CX has finally snapped, probably after playing one of RoboCop's NES games, and he's taken to the streets of old Detroit to get his revenge.
He didn't get his revenge, though. I shot him. Well, I am RoboCop, after all.

It's not all as simple as gunning people down without due legal process, of course. Sometimes people try to run you over with their pick-up trucks, and you have to hammer the buttons to crush their vehicle with them still inside it. If the policing racket doesn't work out, Murphy can always get a job at the local junkyard.

Eventually you'll reach the gun store and the first boss. He's an excitable young man with a chainsaw. As I so often do, I have constructed an elaborate backstory for this young man which explains that he dreamed of being a ballet dancer but was forced, though a combination of poverty and the mockery of his peers, to give up his dancing ambitions and become a lumberjack. That's why he spends the whole bloody fight pirouetting around with his saw extended.
The boss has a chainsaw, and I have a gun with unlimited ammunition. I don't care how big his shinpads were, there was only ever one outcome to this battle and RoboCop moves on to stage two.

Before that, he extracts some information from one of the murderous punks.In the movie he picks the guy up by his nose, which looks a lot more painful than this basic throat-grabbing technique, but the results are the same and RoboCop heads to the Nuke factory.

"Nuke" is one of the central elements of RoboCop 2 The Movie, a hyper-addictive drug that's sweeping the streets and which looks like a melted strawberry freeze-pop. The Nuke is being created by a wannabe-messianic drug lord called Cain, and RoboCop will do anything in his power to bring this villain down - even destroying an arcade full of classic Data East™ titles!

Most of this stage takes place in an arcade packed with Data East cabinets, RoboCop-themed pinball machines and a solitary air hockey table. Well, you have to have an air hockey table, it's not a proper arcade without one. The thwink thwink thwink of paddle on puck is what an arcade should sound like, although this one mostly sounds like gunfire and people yelling "scrap-pile!" at our hero.
It makes sense that in a Data East game all the cabinets would carry their logo, but this isn't something that that's limited to the game - in the movie, RoboCop does indeed visit an arcade packed with all the hot Data East titles of the day.

Bad Dudes vs. Dragonninja, Sly Spy, The Real Ghostbusters, Midnight Resistance: they all appear in this scene, presumably as part of the same deal that saw Data East making the RoboCop games. RoboCop even smashes a corrupt policeman's face into a Bad Dudes cabinet, (although it's actually running Sly Spy,) presumably to fulfil certain contractual obligations about the games getting some close-ups.
So, that's the all-Data East arcade, the most average arcade in the world. What else does stage two have to offer?

Well, it has a boss, naturally. Lurking in an alley behind the arcade is a man in a robotic suit - you can see his face peering out of the visor - who comes equipped with so many land mines that Princess Diana would roll over in her grave to see him. The boss flits back and forth across the screen, dropping mines and the occasional grenade, and he gets so into his destructive work that he seems to be completely oblivious to RoboCop's presence. He just goes about his business, following his patterns, and I get the impression that he'd be doing the exact same thing if RoboCop was sat at home with his feet up. As such, this boss is not too difficult to beat, because you can position yourself so that when he lands you can grab him and throw him to the ground. Over an over again, in fact. Next stage, please!

Oh look, a bonus round. It's only a crosshair-based on-rails shooter, but Data East are at least trying to stir the pot a little. Still, some it does highlight some discrepancies, like the fact it only takes one round from RoboCop's Auto-9 handgun to bring down a helicopter, but those punks can block its fire with their hand-axes. Also, RoboCop can ride a motorcycle despite his vast weight meaning it should be flattened beneath him. I'll give the film-makers a pass on that one, though, because the motorcycle is necessary component of RoboCop's plan to get Cain. That plan is to launch himself face-first through the windscreen of Cain's truck.

Unorthodox villains require unorthodox methods of capture, like smashing their heads into arcade cabinets or turning yourself into a part-man part-machine howitzer round. RoboCop near-invulnerability means that this plan actually works, and Cain is reduced to "brain in a jar" status.

A goofy, Muppet-y brain in a jar with the thickest spinal column I've ever seen. Not to worry, he won't be in a jar for long because OCP decide that Cain the Brain is the perfect candidate to be bolted into the new "RoboCop 2" body. Can you see the problems with this decision? It's "explained" in the film that ordinary people are so horrified with the loss of their precious meat-bodies that they go insane when placed in a RoboCop, so the obvious solution is to put a psychopath in the suit. I want to see what other bright ideas the OCP scientists came up with now. Too many stray dogs in Detroit? How about a machine that makes dogs explode! The summer sun too bright? Destroy the world in an atomic holocaust, creating a nuclear winter that'll protect you from the sun's harmful rays! Coffee gone cold? Use napalm!
Anyway, we'll get to Cain soon enough. First, it's time to break up the drug deal at the abandoned factory!

"Never fear, my fellow street punks! This fort of barrels filled with highly explosive material will protect us from the RoboCop!"
The barrels offer no protection. All those punks are dead now, their bodies identifiable only through dental records.

Right, so it's a gunfight in an abandoned factory? Okay then, that's all I needed to know. It's very RoboCop, but it's not very interesting. The only real moments of note are a brief section where you waggle the joystick to break free of a giant magnet - giant magnets being RoboCop's only natural predator - and the fact that you're fighting zombies. I'm not sure why - I don't remember them being in the movie, but it's a theme that's carried over to the stage's boss.

One of Cain's men is a rockabilly / teddy boy type, and I think this boss is supposed to be him. I'm basing that mostly on his sideburns, if I'm honest. Anyway, I can't remember what happens to this guy in the film, but in the game RoboCop shoots him into a vat of toxic sludge and he comes out as a gloopy mutant.

I was hoping for the Joker, but I suppose this'll do. I'm almost certain this didn't happen in the film, and now I think about it I don't remember seeing the Elvis-a-like's demise at all, so maybe this is based on a deleted scene or something, or maybe it's just nice to have a dripping slimebag as a boss.
He's more of a threat than the previous bosses, too, because he's rather more nimble than the robots and chainsaw thugs of the earlier stages, but as with all crime in Detroit he's mostly vulnerable to one thing: getting picked up and slammed into the ground.
It's an okay boss fight, I suppose, but it does leave me slightly disappointed - there's a scene in the movie where RoboCop sees a bunch of Cain's gang's loot, and amongst it all is Elvis' skeleton in a glass case, which presumably belonged to the this guy. That's not in the game, which is a shame. Pixellated Elvis remains generally guarantee a game gets at least an extra two points on the VGJunk Scale of Neat Things-O-Meter.

On to stage four, and Cain's rampage leads RoboCop to the OCP headquarters. OCP make robots, so get ready to fight plenty of robots. Bulletproof robots, even. The only way to beat them is to, you guessed it, pick 'em up and slam 'em down. Good job someone had the foresight to install Ultimate_Warrior_Bodyslams.dll into RoboCop's system.

And then, in an instant, my main technique was rendered useless. Here's a mid-boss, and it's everybody's favourite constantly-malfunctioning bipedal death-bot, ED-209! Very well drawn he is too, that's a nice sprite. Shame I have to blow him up, really, but if I don't take care of ED-209 it'll just make some comedy howler like getting it's foot stuck in a manhole or gunning down an OCP executive.
Note that the game is displaying "Jumping Shot!!" in the middle of the screen. Modern games must have really beaten me into a soft, mindless jelly with their constant on-screen help and tutorials, and so I unquestioningly tried jumping and shooting ED-209 in the "head". That worked fine... but so did standing on the floor and shooting him, and that's a much easier place from which to dodge his attacks.

See? Much better. This fight really drives home the idea that RoboCop 2 is all about dodging in the Z-axis. You can jump, but it's next to pointless when all you really need to do is avoid being on the same horizontal plane as your opponents to stay alive. Enemies occupy a very narrow strip of space, too, meaning that most of the game's difficulty comes from having to be standing on the exact same plane as the enemy you want to destroy, even when you're fighting something as big as ED here. Hit-and-run tactics are the order of the day in pretty much any of this game's combat situations, and the sooner you get used to lining up a shot and moving out of the way quickly the sooner you'll feel like you're making some progress.

The rest of the stage consists of a few more robots and another boss encounter with this.. thing. Maybe the ski-slopes of the near future are rife with well-armed and highly dangerous terrorists, and only the Piste Protector here can make Val-d'Isere safe for the skiers of this brave new world. OCP isn't one to let a gap in the market go unplugged, after all.
It's another robot with a big gun. After doing battle with the iconic ED-209, it's hard to summon up any enthusiasm for this thing. So I won't. Onwards!

After another driving shoot-em-up section, RoboCop catches up with Cain for the final showdown. Well, the final three or four showdowns, because stage five is a series of battles against RoboCop 2. He's bigger than you, he has more guns than you and he's bonkers, but that's not really a problem as long as you actually pay attention to the "Jumping Shot!!" marker, because this time you really do have to shoot your opponent in the head. And so, the two RoboCops enter into a whirling tango of death, Murphy bouncing up and down like an impatient child in the queue for a ride at Disneyland while Cain waddles back and forth, taking the odd potshot at our hero. It's like fighting ED-209, except I felt a little bit sorry for ED-209 because he puts me in mind of a well-intentioned by ultimately feeble guard dog.
Also, I know OCP are an evil mega-corporation in the best style of the grasping, amoral 1980s, but I think decorating their building with Nazi flags, the swastika removed and replaced by the OCP logo, is perhaps going a bit far. A bit of subtlety wouldn't go amiss.

Next: fight Cain on a lift. He has gained a new move, which is to spin his many arms around like an idiot. It's surprisingly effective.

The lift goes to the roof! Fight Cain on the roof! The fresh air will do you both some good. Cain can fire missiles now. This does little to relieve the tedium of going through the same boss fight for a third time, but once you beat him on the roof, the two RoboCops fall off the edge and plummet to the ground, where Cain will surely be destroyed forever.

I've lied to you, of course. One more battle with Cain to go. My advice to you would be to try to stay away from him and keep moving, only taking your jumping shot when he stops launching missiles. Of course, he launches missiles almost constantly so if you wait for them to stop you'll be slogging through this fight until another good RoboCop film comes out, so instead I suggest you go hog wild on the credits and go for broke.

Even RoboCop's had enough of Cain by the end of their fourth bout, and so rather than reading him his rights and charging him with murder, criminal damage and illicit use of early-Nineties CG he just rips out Cain's brain and crushes it in his fist. It's a shame that this didn't become the standard ending for all videogames, really. It definitely would have spiced up Super Mario World.

"This is not the end," says RoboCop, but he's talking out of his metallic arse because it really is the end of the game. I think he means that it's not the end because OCP must still be brought to justice, but that's a task that requires more delicacy and subtlety than throwing a giant robot off a skyscraper and squishing his brain in my servo-assisted, titanium-coated fist, so I'll leave that to someone else.

RoboCop does some push-ups, the credits roll and RoboCop 2 the arcade game is complete. Except...

There's something I've missed. You see, in the Japanese version of RoboCop 2, there's an extra intro stage that was completely removed from the world versions. It serves as a playable mini-recap of the first RoboCop movie, detailing Murphy's horrible death and rebirth as the Clanking Crusader as he makes his way to the top of the OCP tower for a battle against ED-209 and a showdown with the villainous head of Omni Consumer Products.

I assume that's what's happening, anyway. I can't read Japanese, so for all I know this text could actually be telling the story of an insane ex-cop who dresses in a suit of armour and takes brutal revenge on his former employers.
It's a fun little section, and I can't help but wonder why it was removed from the western versions of the game. Licensing issues, maybe, with Data East not being able to show anything from the first film? Maybe they thought it broke up the flow of the game, but then again they didn't mind making you do the same boss fight four times in a row so Data East's ideas of game flow are clearly "unique" at best. My current leading theory is that they assumed that everyone in America was familiar with the RoboCop story and thus didn't need the recap, and removing it allowed players to get to the harder action sooner and get those credits flowing.

RoboCop 2 is something of a nice surprise, all things considered. Sure it's a licensed videogame that takes a famous character and drops them into a side-scrolling action game, but for a game of that type it's handled about as well as possible. It's short, so boredom doesn't really get a chance to set in, but it's also varied, what with the shooting sections and all. Movements are crisp and predictable and the multi-directional firing works great, and I should make a special note of the graphics: a lot of care and attention was put into giving them a real RoboCop-y flavour, with things like Murphy's shooting poses being accurately recreated and even little touches like the X and Y co-ordinates changing during the first-person sections.

Most of RoboCop 2's problems - the limited nature of the gameplay, mainly - stem from RoboCop himself. He's cool and all, but what are his powers, the hooks from which you can hang interesting gameplay mechanics? He shoots things and he's bulletproof. Not much to work with, is it? Data East should be congratulated for doing the best with what they had, and creating a short, simple but mostly enjoyable run-n-gun title with a nice level of polish. RoboCop 2 can proudly take its place in that great and mysterious Data East-only arcade. It's definitely better than Sly Spy, I can tell you that much.

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