Robocop Vs Terminator (Sega Genesis, 1994)

Wait... Robocop Vs. Terminator Genisys? Don't tell me he was a critic too!

Sega: They do what Nintendon't! ...except not in this case, as the game also saw release on the SNES.

 

Ask the store personnel to see SPECIAL PACKAGE? Sold!

Not Los Angeles? Amazing.

Wait a minute... Skynet was built with Robocop technology? Does James Cameron know about this?

Alright! Sounds like a good start point for the game. Let's battle the mighty ED-209!

Oh, he defeated ED-209 already. What is this, Xenogears Disc 2? And now he's in the future? Actually, no. This isn't an intro or a prologue at all. It's the game opening by telling you everything that is going to happen in the game. ....huh?

First level. Robocop runs around shooting hooligans while THE WORST MUSIC EVER plays. This music is Bebe's Kids level bad. It's a bad synthesizer sample on loop with (alternately) Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger's voices going "Terminator!" every few seconds.

The first boss is this big-breasted gentleman with some kind of gatling gun. It's an easy fight. Difficulty-wise, this game is more logical than The Terminator on Sega CD because it starts out in the present and moves to the future, rather than the other way around.

It doesn't take long for Robocop and The Terminator to find themselves on the biggest collision course since Alien Vs Predator.

The Terminator takes a huge amount of punishment to defeat, and pops up every time you think the battle is over.

When he's reduced to skeletal form, the battle is nearly concluded. Not bad, I gotta say.

The next level is mostly vertical, and the highlight is Robocop having to fight... whatever this thing is. I assume it's something from the Robocop universe.

And we're back in the Terminator realm of designs as a proto-HK attacks our hero. Weird thing is, the later levels in the future don't have any real HKs. I think they ran out of cartridge space.

Halfway through the game is the ED-209 fight mentioned in the intro. This was the hardest fight in the game for me aside from the final boss, because I didn't have a good weapon at this point and had to fight him with the awful starter weapons. I missed the couple of instances of well-hidden upgrades in the early levels. I barely scraped past this.

So...what does the ED stand for? Erectile Dysfunction?

As was prophesized, Robocop now gets transported to The Future. ...that or he's in a slightly worse part of Detroit.

Terminators are found en masse here (as opposed to the one in the present), but Robocop quickly acquires a plasma rifle that makes them much easier to take down.

There are two levels of plasma rifle: red and gold. Red is powerful enough on its own to take a terminator down within a few shots, but within the level I somehow got it upgraded to gold. In addition to looking a lot like the Plasma Beam in Metroid 2, this beam vaporizes terminators in one shot. This is the best weapon in the game, so once you get this you want to hold onto it. Weapon upgrades and drops suddenly become your worst enemy. It is no hyperbole to say that accidentally picking up a different weapon is more of a threat than most of the enemies are.

What are pools of fire doing in the ruins? They have Mario-esque flames leaping up out of them, too. They might as well go all the way and just add Mario to make this a three way crossover.

At the end of the fire pits... this thing. I don't know what it is. Whenever I don't recognize something from the Terminatorverse I assume it's from the Robocopverse. It's a nasty fight due to the instant-death fire and the fact that you can barely leap over anything in this game without making contact and taking huge damage.

The "Skynet Boss"? There's a Skynet Boss?

Yep, here it is. It's the final boss, and wouldn't you know it... it's a giant head.

"I am the Bishop of Battle. Master of all I survey."

 ::Emilio Estevez plays the game furiously::

This fight is obnoxiously difficult, in part because the head summons crowds of metal Metroids that fly at you in weird patterns. Also, terminators randomly appear (woe to you if you can't one-shot them) from the sides. The question is... why would Skynet's CPU be a giant Terminator head in the first place? Shouldn't it be a big CPU in a mainframe or something like that?

Around ten minutes (and what seemed like 500+ hits) later, the Skynet Boss finally falls. It's baffling that even with the best weapon, this boss takes roughly as long to defeat as every other boss in the game combined.

"Crossfire! Crossfire!! CROSSFIRRRE!!"

"YEAH! YEAH!"

By defeating Skynet in the future, Robocop prevented it from sending back an army of terminators, or somesuch nonsense. There was a Terminator invasion? Hey, why not. The "It's just him and me!" canon hasn't been significant since T2 completely shattered it.

In closing... cool game. It took about an hour, and was pretty easy. But I have no major complaints.

Wait, what? Am I sore? What the hell are you asking me, game? And there aren't any secret levels! Well, at least they managed to spell most of the words right in the ending. That's saying a lot for an early 90's action game.