GEN - TechnoCop

Haiku-Review:

drug deals, hostages...
what pedestrian crimes. wait....
baby being crushed!?

Additional Comments:

No words....

Seriously, there are no words for what I saw flash on screen as I drove into the Golden Apartments on York Street. The call's gone out and I'm responding to a 151 - baby being crushed? Think about that - a baby is being crushed. A baby is being crushed! Good god! Somewhere out there some demented fuckup is crushing babies. But more worrying is that somewhere out there a game developer has run out of ideas regarding usable crimes: hostages, drugs etc., and had a light bulb flicker when it came to baby being crushed. I don't know; maybe this is a common problem in a hard luck, dystopian future.

Honestly, I think I should just call the commentary on TechnoCop. Need anything else be said? Is there really anything worth saying beyond the dark and twisted promotion of baby crushing? Sadly, yes. As if with enthusiastic anticipation, the amount of bellyaching this game has to offer is simply astounding. But here's the catch: typically, I find myself drawn to bad games. There's a certain appeal about them - maybe a sort of ugly duckling syndrome. The obvious downside to this bizarre obsession is having to tackle games that are truly awful. And that's exactly what TechnoCop is - a truly awful mess of a game. Though I have to wonder if this nightmare is yet another result of porting a computer game to a console, or was it always this bad. Hearing the Day's mention the game in passing on one of their episodes of Co-Optitude as a "great" Amiga entry certainly confounded the situation. Huh.

Although it takes some serious imagination, I can envision potential here. Unfortunately, the game falls flat on its face and shamelessly wallows in a fetid pool of failure and frustration. What really makes it stick out as an interesting case though is that the game is split into two wholly different styles of gameplay and Razorsoft miraculously botched them both beyond belief.  TechnoCop is a combination driver, in the vein of Roadblasters, and platformer, to me most closely resembling Flashback. I'm on the fence over which portion of the game works better, if at all.

Technically, the driving sequences probably outshine the platforming areas, but sadly they are boring, irksome, and at times questionable. It's been a long time since I really sat down and played a screen-in racing game - the likes of Rad Racer, OutRun etc. The driving sequences in The Adventures of Bayou Billy may have been the last of that style that I've played in some time, and those are pretty rough and tumble themselves. Point is, I'm a little sketchy on how the physics normally work in those games since it's been a number of years, but I found myself fighting the "turn right to go left / turn left to go right" mechanics in TechnoCop. This very well may be the case in other racing games of the type, so I could be speaking out of my ass, but it's never felt so prevalent as it here. Add in a half dozen semis trying to shove you into the trees and steering is damn near hopeless. Never mind that the car's gun turret is positioned asymmetrically and its defenses are useless against some truck stop punker angrily beating away at the roof with his bare fists. Seriously, why is this so damaging, yet I can rub up against three rigs simultaneously over the course of 26 miles without even a scratch? And why can I only remove that bionic armed mutant by casually crashing into the trees? I guess there's always a nuke, but I'm not going to waste a nuke willy-nilly.

Outshines? Eh...maybe not. Those driving sequences are likely some of the worst driving sequences I've ever experienced in a game. So maybe the platforming is the real hero here. After all, it makes up the greater bulk of the game; not just design-wise, but the amount of action and exploration that takes place. Wait...am I even playing the same game? Where am I? I cannot comprehend the design choices in this game at all. One minute we're barreling down a country road, guns a blazing and then suddenly were working our way through a labyrinth of inner city projects. I parked my car in a fucking field on the side of some highway that appears to run endlessly through miles upon miles of nothing. Where the hell did this run down tenement block come from? It doesn't exist! Oh, but it does, and the transition is such a bizarre, jerky juxtaposition of environments that it belittles the overall concept of the game. It literally feels like I'm playing two completely different, and wholly unrelated games. Couldn't the developers have at least used a city background in the driving sequences? Maybe replace all of the trees with streetlamps? For example, in The Adventures of Bayou Billy, which utilizes three distinct styles of gameplay, one could argue the same dilemma in its I-10 driving stage as presented here in TechnoCop, except that when you finish said stage in that game a representation of New Orleans appears in the background offering proper continuity between the stagnant marshlands of Billy's home and the streets of...ok, I'll be nice and keep my personal feelings out of it, eh...New Orleans. I guess Razorsoft hoped for a suspension of disbelief on the player's part. I prefer to think of it as laziness on their part. I guess detailing the gruesome deaths of the criminal presence was far more important.

Enough of the aesthetics and all-around nominal plot-based pitfalls; what little hope TechnoCop desperately clung to was clearly for naught after fighting my way through floor after floor of men of ill repute. Instantly, Flashback came to mind based on the protagonist's basic moveset, but similar to my ladder issues in Faxanadu, I let the idea sink in too much for my own good. Time and time again I was infuriated over not being able to duck and roll. I think that one ability alone would have helped the overall feel of the platforming areas. Otherwise, it felt so rigid, almost restricting when forced to duck to take aim and then try and advance. I went through the game nearly three times to the end, not including numerous practice runs on the first seven or eight stages, and still never got a proper handle on quickly ducking then standing again to proceed. Such a little thing became a monumental battle throughout.

Also, hitboxes make no sense. I've played numerous games with bad hitboxes, but I've never had a hitbox frustrate me as much as the ones found here. Damage is confusing and unreliable under all circumstances. Times when I swore I successfully dodged a hit - nope, damaged. Other times I miraculously escaped by the skin of my teeth - don't know how, but I'll take it. Talking about unreliable, dynamite is the most unpredictable device in the game. Why is there dynamite replenishing my health? I'm chalking that one up to a grievous error and/or an all out dickish implementation solely to fuck with the player's head. It's the fucking timer in Where's Waldo all over again. And I swear I saw a knife pass through a wall, but my bullets sure can't. This game is an exercise in programming anarchy. Honestly, as terrible as the driving sequences are, this blatant defiance of basic video game principle is what allows it to be marginally better than the platforming in my view.

Yet there's so much more awry in the platforming. For one, the timer seems to be some arbitrary number pulled out of thin air. In some levels it's barely enough time to do...well, anything. I thought the timer was unforgivable in some of the Spy vs. Spy levels, but here it's just stupid. At the same time, however, there's some levels that have such an absurd abundance of time that I could have run two or three levels on its timer alone. Whatever the criteria for the timer is, it's not working. Sure, I managed it, but those questionable levels typically finished with the timer at 00:01, and I had to fight like hell just to ensure that. You absolutely have to know the building's layout if you hope to have any sort of a chance in those tightly timed levels.

Another annoyance relates to jumping. To me, if a platformer balks jumping, it's all over. TechnoCop's jumping is simply atrocious and to add to the frustration are sequences of pits that don't seem to align to the character's jump distance properly. Well, they do, but it takes some solid effort to jump at the perfect moment thus pushing it into the realms of pixel-perfect jumping. Pixel-perfect jumping is always a drag, but I probably wouldn't mind it at much here if it weren't for some of those super short timers forcing you to press your luck on a set of successive jumps typically ending in utter disappointment, and very likely, death.

I could go on and on, but given all the problems so far, what's the point? TechnoCop is easily one of the worst games I've ever played. In fact, I billed the game as the second worst game I've ever played to a couple friends of mine. I just don't see anything toppling Where's Waldo from that prized step. But what really rubs salt in the wound - if the game wasn't bad enough - is that we're treated to a soundtrack of silence. That's right, other than than the opening titles, which sounds akin to some uninspired rock chops saturated with a nails-on-a-chalkboard melody, and the end screen, which is a lot better than the opening track but still nothing to write home about, there is no music to be found. Instead we get to bask in the droning 16-bit engine depression of the driving sequences and clump clump clump of the heaviest boots in the world during the platforming. If this was done for purposes of mood immersion, it failed. Rather, I suspect, it was done out of laziness. If they at least went the route that Flashback went and added minute bursts of suspense - short 3 to 5 second clips of eeriness - that would have gone a long way to help exemplify mood if that's indeed what they were shooting for. But then, why should I expect any sort of effort given how the rest of the game is presented?

Nano-Win:

Holy crap, a win!?  It's not really a win, but it made me chuckle...probably out of pity. I love that the game has a cheat mode and then acknowledges the use of the cheat mode at the end of the game by snidely calling you out on it.

Sure thing, dicks. Your game sucked anyways.

Still, as torturous as the game was, I had to reach the end legitimately. What a worthless ending.... Should have just called it after the cheat-filled run.

Rating: 0.5 pointlessly awarded hydraulic wheel rams out of 5*

Seriously, do they do anything!?