RoboCop atari amiga

ROBOCOP - ATARI/AMIGA
The Atari ST and the Amiga ports are known to be the best conversions available for the home market and are more or less identical. The Amiga does feature some better sounds and effects aswell as better music but grafics wise it's the same. Something that annoyed Amiga owners at the time.

Being based on the advanced Arcade game the home ports does a pretty good job of emulating the gameplay of the original. Everything is a lot smaller and odd looking but it works. You can't ignore the huge border though that destroys a little of the feel of the game. The Atari and Amiga produced some rather impressive titles back in the days so there were quite a lot of people that wondered why the border was needed at all. RoboCop on the ST/Amiga is a straight forward run, jump and shoot game. The high difficulty of the arcade machine was toned down with special weapons having more ammo and Robo standing slightly more damage, and while the game is now (too?) easy, it's enjoyable right to the end.

Gameplay stays pretty close to the original although some akward moments appear when Robo has to jump and you realise that the joystick only has the fire button. This is solved by either pressing the space bar button or quickly pressing down and up on the joystick. Either way it becomes fiddly and often results in your death when facing a end of level boss. And speaking of boss enemies, for some reason most of them just move from the right and ram you when it reaches the left side - making it more a race against time than an actual challenge. This is especially true with ED-209 who just walks across the screen crushing you flat out while the arcade version moved left and right and treated you with a bit more respect. Other than that the bosses stay pretty true to their Arcade cousin, that is except for the final confrontation with Dick Jones that has a different take on it, but more about that further down.

BONUS LEVELS:
Every now and then, actually after every level, the bonus levels cut in and are extremely welcome in breaking the monotony of the shooty platform bits. The arcade game had only the target practice section but the home version gets two additional ones. The photofit screen in particular is great, with huge digitised pictures of the crooks and tense music as the seconds tick down. The famous scene where you have to save the female hostage by shooting through here skirt is recreated in the other bonus round wich is a variant of the target practice part but with people instead of cardboard targets. These bonus levels are actually the most fun sections in the whole game.

VERSION DIFFERENCES:
The most noticable difference is that the the very last level is missing. Whereas in the Arcade game RoboCop would enter the boardroom and battle a advanced ED-209 unit the whole section is now replaced with a bonus level variant where you have to fire at Dick Jones but avoid hitting the old man. It actually works pretty good and something that the arcade game would have benefited from. Due to tecnical limitations you don't get to face two ED-209 units at the same time in the OCP tower but just one. A little odd change is that the super ammo upgrade has gotten a grafic overhaul from the dual red bullets in the arcade to a blue spark looking thing in the home versions. The intro and ending has, for size issues presumably, been greatly reduced. What it has instead is a nice RoboCop title screen (with sampled speech) and a horribly pixelated media break screen, oddly called Newsview, when loading level 1.

GAME HINTS:

	PHOTOFIT This section can get very confusing. The best tactic is to concentrate on one side of the face - for example, if you're matching the ears, just try and match the right ear, rather than looking at the face as a whole.
	HOSTAGE SECTION The way to succeed here is to aim just to the right of the villain at about chest height and keep firing. He eventually walks into the firing line and drops dead.

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Converting RoboCop