Robocop 2 (Amstrad GX4000, Ocean/Orion, 1990)

The Amstrad GX4000 is nothing but a footnote in console history. And I mean this, with no hyperbole.

For example, the PC Engine, sold in the US as the Turbografx 16, is regarded as an underdog in the retro console market and very few people talk about it. Despite selling 2.5 million units in the US.

The GX4000, image courtesy of wikipedia

The GX4000 sold a whopping 15 000 units. Despite Britain being a much smaller market then the US, in less then a year it was being sold for slightly more then the sale price of it's games, or only £30.

The reasons for this is probably the lack of an established console market in Britain. The NES there was handled very poorly marketing-wise, and there was a blooming computer gaming market with several competing computers, with budget games going for £2 or less. One of the leading computer brands of the time was Amstrad. The company produced 9 different versions of home computers, 3 types of notepad computers, 7 types of word processors and 29 PC Compatible computers, one of which was an Amstrad computer with a built in Sega Genesis/Megadrive.

So having as many computer products out as they did, the dumbest thing they could have done when trying to market their britain-only games console that was trying to take on both Sega and Nintendo, would be to take games availible on their computers for £4 and rerelease them for said console, priced at £25.

Robocop 2 is one of the few cartridge-only games released for the console. It is a bit of an odd thing. Published by Ocean, it was apparently developed by the people known as Orion, which seems to have consisted of only three people, who'se names in the credits are written in signature form and are thus completely illegible.

The game is a mish mash of three different styles. The main game consists of platforming, with two different "bonus rounds" between levels consisting of a puzzle game and a crosshair target range shooter. Your half man half walking metallic battering ram can jump and shoot his gun at several different angles. The problem is you won't be using that gun very much, as 90 % of gameplay is spent jumping over gaps and timing death traps.

You see, the level design has thrown out all measures of realism and has instead gone for a "Willy Wonka's Death Sport Arena" layout, where the whole level is filled to the brim with laser guns, pitts of molten metal, magnets in the walls, what look like giant metal accordions, giant spikes embeded into walls, artificial lightning generators, rock and barrel dispensers and basically anything else you can image. Unless Circe de Soleil gets into the drug smuggling racket, I don't see how any business could be done here by anyone, legal or otherwise.

There are very few enemies you can actually kill (about six in total) and they are guaranteed to get a hit on you as they start shooting you the moment you come into their line of fire, even shooting you diagonally down through a platform. As you can only aim your gun at certain angles, you are going to take at least some hits before you can get safely below the bad guy and shoot him in the ass. Your health is represented by your energy meter, which is always going down. But unlike say Adventure Island, your energy runs out real fast, and you can only ever really get recharge items in bonus rooms you find along the way.

Some of these are easy, but some are just insane as far as difficulty is concerned. Let's just say the room with one way conveyer belt platforms leading up to a series of "mystery tiles" which somehow kill you when you just jump past them, with about one inch worth of safe space you have to jump up on is probably not worth your time.

Unlike your healthbar, your time limit is fairly generous, and you can find recharges along the way, so it's less of a hassle. There is one more item you can collect that actually does something other then gives points, a short term invincibility shield, however I only ever found it in one spot in the final level and it runs out very fast and there's nothing much in the way of deadly obstacles in your way when you pick it up. Sort of a waste of time, really.

The level ends at a seemingly random place at the very end of the path, after which you get your score and move onto the second gameplay type this game has to offer: the puzzle game.

It's supposedly the Robocop trying to recover fragments of his memory, but really all it is is a huge pain in the backside. You move about the computer maze, and have to avoid the chips. You can move the tiles vertically and horizontally if you press down the fire button and then pick a direction but on the other hand you can only ever cross a space once. Sometimes you may be lucky and move a piece of still-untrodden land behind you, but most of the time you will just screw yourself over. There is no way to really practise this and you have to complete four screens of this in a row....unless you go "screw it", hit the enter button and just skip the whole thing. I only ever managed to complete the second round but I'm not sure if completing both does anything for you except get you points.

Afterwards you move onto the target practice round. These seem to serve no point then to prolong the game though, as they are static and not a lot happens in them. Also your hits will sometimes not count if your crosshair isn't dead center on the guy.

At the very end of the last level awaits a boss battle and it's amazing how lazy the programmers were. Seeing as how they didn't bother with sticking to anything halfway plausible in the level design, you'd think the boss battle at the end would be a good place to put your platforming skills to the test. But no, it's literally only a matter of having full health when going into the fight, as the boss fights you by running into you and there's no way to avoid him as he's so much bigger then you. You just have to have enough energy to be able to pass through him twice and run off, shooting at him every few steps. At the end the thing doesn't even explode, the game just randomly cuts to the score screen and then goes to credits.

In the end it's not a bad game, but a bit on the underwhelming side which I guess also contributed to the system's failure.

Ulises (DOS, Opera Soft, 1988)

I've never been much of a computer gamer. I was born around a time when up to date gaming on the computers was just a bit too much for my pocket. However I was born so late that I never really got to see any of the older 16 bit computers in action, let alone used them, so I was kind of out of luck on that front either. And as for the console gaming market, well....

Unfortunately, I also grew up in a post communist country where the existence of the NES is an obscure footnote which barely anyone knows about or gets covered in any detail. Even if there will be a programme on TV about old school gaming, it will mostly just focus on old 16 bit computers, and maybe, maybe have an Atari 2600 make an appearance. The system was never permitted to be sold here officialy, due to it being a "luxurious" product of "capitalist burgeois classes" and thusly something not compatible with the "socialist way of life". The only memory people in this country have of having played any of the classic NES staples were possible due to ill-documented famiclones smugled from Poland which thus received no widespread circulation.

However, the computer scene wasn't exactly well represented either, as gaming was generally frowned on as an unnecessary side product when compared to industrial and business usage. In fact, old news coverage of a computer "expo" from the 80's stated that "the only aspect of computer programming not present is gaming, as an evolutionary dead-end". This coupled with high prices and state mandated wages in state owned companies in an unfunctioning isolated economic system meant that computers were not very common, and home brew games (as there were few, if any, official game releases in the country) were thus also not very widespread.

I am adding this just as an explanation as to how my country could have so little exposure to gaming, on either platform.

In the west however, things were different. Not only were there official releases and ports of games by big gaming publishers released for the various home computers, there were also many original studios and publishers putting out original content. Less famous then the various British developers would be the company Opera Soft. During their short time in operation (they formed in 1987 and seem to have not released anything of note after 1990, going out of business in the early years of that decade) they published a handfull of games, none of them being much remembered today, beyond a game version of The Name of the Rose.

This game came out in 1988 on a variety of platforms, though only the DOS version is covered. It concerns Ulysses, also known as Odysseus, though the game itself doesn't have much to do with the mythological figure. It's basically a platformer where you jump over gaps, climb ropes and try to rescue a bunch of identical godesses who don't do much but stand around in semi risque attire.

Sadly, it's one of those platformers. The kind where there wasn't any thought given to enemy placement and they just constantly respawn over and over again. It becomes incredibly overwhelming, especially when trying to platform. And since you can't turn around when climbing up a ladder, this makes the game very frustrating.

Which is a shame because there is some genuine level design, the backgrounds are never the same for too long and, even if there are only six enemy tpyes, there are noticeable differences between them: the birds just fly at you, the minotaurs chase you and then turn into super fast bulls that charge you, the centaurs shoot arrows at you which can't be avoided, the fire demons which sort fly at you at an angle and the fire skeletons which shoot fireballs at you and don't die but who'se sprites don't actually hurt you and the.....giant geographical globes kinda roll in your general direction.

Not helping matters is the control scheme. Whoever thought the buttons should be Q (UP), A (DOWN), O (LEFT), P (RIGHT), Space (attack) and Entet (pause) has never even glanced at an average keyboard layout, which makes it very confusing to correctly jump over gaps at first.

One odd question though, could this have started out as a game staring Thor ? The blond haired Ulysses could very well fit the bill and there's the fact his weapon (and the icons which indicate how many lives he ha sleft) is a big ol' hammer, which isn't something one would associate with Greek myths.

Overall the game, while looking nice for 1988, would probably drive you crazy if you tried to complete it without save states.