RoboCop

The Good
I would say Robocop originally is one of the best action games that Ocean created from scratch for their movie licenses. With a few tweaks it even became an arcade game. It's a hit among the many misses. The C64 version however...

Well it's got pretty gimmicks.

There is a loading screen with a digitized picture taken from the movie. The game graphics are colorful and ambitious, maybe a bit too much (it looks horribly dated by just a couple years later even on C64), Robocop himself made of high-resolution sprites, and the usual 50FPS smooth scrolling.

The music is very cool and atmospheric. It's not the Robocop theme song, but I think it wouldn't be out of place in the move.

I love when the gameplay starts, it plays a digitized sample and a funny sounding bass fanfare, like "ROBOCOP dun dun DUNDUN dun!"

The Bad
I played this back in the day. It's incredibly hard, unfair, and it feels like a chore to play. Robocop slides forward like he is riding an invisible unicycle, while a million things keep bombarding him so fast it's impossible. He's not even like the tank he was in the movie, the life meter drops to zero in no time. Never got trough even half of the first level, no matter how hard I tried! It's just not fun.

Rubbing salt to the wound, the YT longplay revealed that level 3 is an unfinished mess of glitches.

As a bonus, it gets silly to see Robocop jumping(!) whenever you try shoot upwards. As in, hovering high into the air and back, bouncy bouncy! Jumping has not even any real use in this game and it's just in the C64 version.

Then there is the deal of selecting either in-game tune or sound effects. That's the least of our problems.

The Bottom Line
Recently I tried out the Z80 versions (Spectrum/Amstrad/MSX), and while far behind in cosmetics, they are well designed, well drawn, and good to play. The C64 version is supposed to be the same game in theory, but it's very off and unpolished. Heck, I even had more fun with the Apple II one than I ever had with this! As horrible as that version is, still gave me that "Let's have another go!" feeling, unlike this.

The scoreboard entries has some pretty depressing words as default. Maybe that's the story of the development.

"panic... anxiety... depression..."