Fig 1. Title Screen ... Yeuck !! (Click for a Full Size image)

RoboCop was a fantastic movie - one of my all time favourite movies even now that it is May 2000. In addition, RoboCop was also a great Arcade Game ! RoboCop challenged you to be "Part Man - Part Machine - All Cop" and the future of law enforcement. On the Amiga, there was a great conversion of the arcade game. So, it was with high expectations that I purchased the PC version of RoboCop - way back in November 1990.

In the arcades, RoboCop was an addictive mixture of shoot-em-up and beat-the-hell-em-up, and featured crisp graphics, great sound effects, digitised speech, and smooth game play. Unfortunately, these important game aspects were lost in the conversion to the IBM-PC. In addition, in the PC version there are : No mission screens. No Hi-Res RoboCop Pictures. No digitised speech. No 256 colour / VGA mode. and this is sucks hard ! The graphics are EGA only (even on a Super-VGA screen), even though the game box claims to support VGA graphics. Also, the graphics are fuzzy and badly defined. RoboCop's bullets look pieces of toast instead of bullets, and RoboCop is fuzzy and only remotely resembles the arcade or movie RoboCop. In addition, all of the sprites are badly drawn, have terrible colours, and have an ugly green border around them. EGA graphics supports 16 colours, which might have been OK if used properly, but the sprites use 8 colours at most (even counting the green for the ugly green border around them), and look terrible as a result.

Fig 2. During the game ... Yeuck !! (Click for a Full Size image) Fig 3. Arcade Machine Robocop - Can you spot the difference(s) ? (Click for a Full Size image)

Fig 4. Assorted Close Ups (Full Size)

Keyboard control is awkward to say the least. Arrow keys cannot be used nor can numeric keypad keys ! Instead, the game requires the use of spread out control keys and function keys. eg. to shoot up and right requires three keys to be pressed at once. The box, in which the game comes, shows excellent looking screen shots, but when you get the game home you quickly realise that these screen shots must be from the arcade version of the game, because they certainly aren't the PC version. This is false advertising in my book !! This is not good enough in a competitive games industry. The game does come with a decent sized poster of RoboCop, on the back of which are brief game instructions in English, French, and German. i.e. the Game's manual is on the back of the poster. So whatever you do, don't put the poster on your wall, because you will be forever taking the thing down to look up the obscure control keys. The game does not have any sound card support, so the best you will hear are the terrible beeps, burps, and farts coming from the PC's speaker. To top of everything, the game features "Key Disk" copy protection on the disk means that you *must* have the original floppy disk in the drive while playing, and that you cannot run it solely from the hard-disk. It also means that you cannot back-up your game. Running the game from a floppy disk is extremely slow. I can't imagine why Ocean put "Key Disk" copy protection on the game. You would have to have rocks in your head to play the damn thing let alone want to pirate it !!

In short, the PC version of the game does not measure up to the excellent arcade game or the very good Amiga version.

Because I purchased this game as part of a special introductory offer to a computer club, I only paid $10 (Aus) for it. Thank God I only wasted $10 on it !!

The PC version of the game should have been called RoboCRAP !

Since buying this game, I have always avoided purchasing Ocean games.

I have been playing games on the PC since the early 1980's, and this game reminds me of some of the games that were out on the PC pre-1985, but these games usually had great gameplay even if their graphics were below par by todays standards. However, RoboCop on the PC is not as good as many of these pre-1985 games - and it was released 6 years after them. Examples of pre-1985 games that are better than late-1990 RoboCop include: J-Bird, Digger, and Spacewar.

In 1988/89, sound cards started becoming widespread on PCs, and VGA graphics was standard on new PCs, and some real quality Hi-Res games started appearing on the PC, and we could hold our heads up high as our Atari ST and Amiga owning friends started taking real notice of the PC as a serious games platform. Games like Ironman's Off Road, Operation Wolf, Prince of Persia, Stellar 7, etc.

In late 1990, I remember being quite shocked at how bad this game was compared to the many quality VGA games with sound card support that I already had owned and long played on the PC. I was hoping that PC RoboCop would be another of these great games, but, sadly, it was obviously a very cheap and nasty attempt by Ocean to cash in on the RoboCop movie and Arcade Game success. How Ocean could have released such a poor quality game in such a competitive market is beyond me.

Ocean should get a big kick up the backside for ever releasing this rubbish.

Dos Vs Windows :

One slightly redeeming feature of this game that I have found is that this DOS game runs in DOS and "perfectly" in a DOS shell under Windows 95 / 98. (I haven't tested it under Windows 3 or NT). The game ran "perfectly" and at full speed (in DOS or Windows 98) on my Pentium 100.

I could NOT press Alt-Enter to make the full screen DOS screen a Window's window, but I was able to change the Window properties to Windowed rather than Full Screen on-the-fly, and then use Paint Shop Pro (for Windows) to generate the screen shots which you see in this review. Not all DOS games allow this - normally the screen is a little corrupted when you view it in a small windows in Windows.

Game Summary :

Name :	RoboCRAP
Developer :	Ocean
Recommended Retail Price :	$25 Aus
Release Date :	October, 1990
Graphics :	5%
Sound :	1%
Music :	0%
Accuracy :	3%
Longevity :	2%
Operating System(s) :	MS-DOS, but runs fine under Windows 95 / 98.
Expandability / Extendability :	Nil.
Multi-player :	No.
HD Installable :	No.
Any Copy protection :	Yes Bad Ocean, Bad !!! The game has horrid "Key Disk" copy protection which means you must have the floppy disk in the drive while you play, even if the game is installed on your hard-disk. I hate this sort of crap !
Overall Rating :	2%

Moose's Rating : 0.2 / 10

The above review is Copyright © Moose O'Malley, October 24, 1996.
Screen shots and extra information added 3-May-2000.