RoboCop

In those times, there was no more exciting moment of the month than those last days when I went to the kiosk to ask if Micromanía had already arrived ... Sometimes it was on the 29, sometimes the 30 ... If it was not there, I went home with disappointment thinking that you would have to put up with another 24 hours, maybe more. If he was, the emotion overflowed. The game on the cover could be something already announced, or a discovery. In any case, if it was Dinamic or Ocean / Imagine, the emotion was somewhat greater. Everyone has their preferences, conscious or subconscious, and mine were those.

And is that if a license fell into the hands of Ocean, most likely they ended up publishing a masterpiece, and I come to mind, with the game we have in hand, The Untouchables or Batman: The Movie The process was the same in all three cases: technical waste, splitting the story into several different development minigames, a lot of publicity and conversions. Robocop, in fact, came to have its version in coin-op starting from the game, in the hands of Data East, which makes it-that I remember-in the only game that went from computer to coin-op and not the other way around.

From the creation of the Spectrum version, which is what I had and from which the MSX part, Mike Lamb was responsible for the programming and Dawn Drake in the graphic section (I still remember an interview with this girl in which she explained that she did not like too much to play, but she did drawing). They are the same two that the aforementioned Batman did, and they were joined by the always wonderful Jonathan Dunn in the musical section.

Álvaro Mateos (West Bank) and David Brioso (Captain Sevilla) were in charge of their conversion to MSX, and they did it very, very well. As you know, we have mentioned over and over again the fact that the MSX versions did not take advantage of the capacity of that computer (which also happened, but to a much lesser extent, with some of Amstrad and C64). Even being aware of that, we must take into account the times that were running, and what were the usual practices. And in that context, the conversion is excellent. They are the Spectrum graphics yes, but they were very good already on Sinclair's computer. It does not have hardware scroll, either, but in this case it is better, that the MSX horizontal scroll would jump if you remember, and in this kind of games is a disadvantage. And if not, take a look at "Gangjeol Robocop", an unofficial Korean version full of colors that does not touch the sole of the shoes.

Its distribution was not limited to Spain, but Ocean gave it out outside our country. Being a computer without too much presence in the UK or France, the main markets of the Manchester company, there is no doubt that the result must have been very satisfactory.

My opinion is that it is one of the great 8-bit movie licenses. It's well done, it looks good, the sound is up to the mark and it's tremendously playable; without becoming easy, it can be finished in a prudential time.