Ocean’s movie tie-in starring the Future of Law Enforcement was one of the mostly anticipated releases of 1989, and rightly so: with an intellectual concept almost tailor-made for games, this side-scrolling shooter should have been gaming gold. I'm a huge fan of the movie (stably in my Top Ten films of all time since its release), and I had played the hell out of the Data East arcade game, so it's needless to say that I was eager to get my hands on the Commodore 64 version. The first impression was indeed very good: the graphics were detailed, colorful and ambitious, with a clever combination of multicolor and hi-res, gorgeous overlayed sprites and smooth scrolling. Jonathan Dunn's music was cool and atmospheric: it wasn't Basil Poledouris' memorable theme, but in my opinion it wouldn't have been out of place in the movie. The controls were debatable (it gets silly to see Robocop jumping whenever he tries to shoot upwards, and why giving him the ability to jump, when jumping has no real use in the game?), and the gameplay was on the hard side, but with a few tries the game could be mastered. All in all, though not being a masterpiece, the game seemed to keep its promises. Personally I loved the default entries in the scoreboard: "depression", "alienation", "misery", "despair", which seemed to mirror RoboCop's inner torment... simply brilliant.
Unfortunately, Murphy’s efforts to dispense justice came to a premature end in level 5 (the Drug Factory), where an overly low time limit made it impossible to complete by normal means. The eventual discovery of a glitch that lets RoboCop walk through walls did little to help matters, because the subsequent level was completely broken, filling the screen with corrupt graphics and visual garbage. It's appalling that a stellar software house like Ocean released this game in an unfinished and buggy state: I'm starting to think that quality assurance wasn't a major concern back then. It's even rumored that Ocean was fully aware of the corruption in level 6, but they desperately needed to ship the game in time for the Christmas shopping season, so they deliberately reduced the allotted time in level 5 in order to make it impossible to complete, hoping to hide the faulty sixth level... This is pure perversion, if you ask me.
However, thanks to the endeavours of ElfKaa, a 100% working version of the game was released in 2012. Not only does this version fix the timer issue in the Drug Factory by giving 30 additional seconds, it also resolves the graphics corruption in level 6, allowing players to finally complete the game. Apparently, the data matrix for level 6 was entirely missing in the PAL version (a sprite editor was located in its place!), but it was intact in the rare NTSC release, which ElfKaa used to rebuild the graphics. I have recently discovered and tried this version, and it was like coming full circle after 30 years, as I was finally able to get past level 6, kill Dick Jones and save the Old Man's ass. ElfKaa's fix comes with two trainers (infinite energy and infinite time) and it includes the original loading screen. Several other minor issues have been addressed (including random visual artifacts that appeared in some circumstances), and now we have a fully working RoboCop game that really does justice to its name.
You can download the fixed version of RoboCop here.