RoboCop 3

While Amiga, Atari ST, and MS-DOS received an ambitious mix of five gameplay styles built on a custom 3D engine from Digital Image Design, Ocean Software entrusted the NES version of RoboCop 3 to an entirely different studio – the British Probe Software, which a year later designed the game from the ground up differently, adapted to the limitations of the 8-bit console and its weaker hardware.

Probe split the game into two clearly distinct parts. The opening section is designed as an over-the-shoulder shooting gallery in the style of Operation Wolf, where the player aims a crosshair at enemies running toward the foreground – a similar mechanic briefly appeared in Data East's arcade version of RoboCop 2, but here it forms only the opening portion of the whole game. After that, the game switches to a classic side-scrolling platformer, where RoboCop moves through the levels of Detroit, shoots in several directions, and handles short close-quarters combat sections – closer, in other words, to how the series' first computer entry worked back in 1988 than to Digital Image Design's ambitious version for more powerful machines.

This split into two distinct gameplay parts within a single cartridge makes the NES version a standalone piece of work, independent of what was being made at the same time for more powerful home computers. Instead of simulating vehicle driving or jetpack flight, as Digital Image Design's version offered, Probe had to find a more economical solution suited to the NES hardware, choosing a combination of two genres instead of five different gameplay styles. At the time, Ocean Software routinely entrusted versions for the American market and 8-bit consoles to different partner studios than those working on versions for European home computers, and RoboCop 3 is a typical example of this.

Why play it: The NES version of RoboCop 3 is interesting as a completely different take on the same license than the computer version – a more compact mix of shooting gallery and platformer designed by a different studio for weaker hardware, not a simplified rewrite of the Amiga version.