Winners don’t do drugs.
By PaulEMoz

Remember this?

This was in the original NARC, and all of Midway’s arcade games of the late ‘80s. Now we have a twenty-first century update, and your characters use drugs as power-ups. Is this a sign of the times, or a blatant attempt to cash in on controversy?

The signs were there early on. You don’t come out with a high-profile remake of a well-known arcade game, fill it with expensive voice talent, and then, er, set a budget price point unless there’s something seriously amiss. Oh, and spending all that money on Hollywood actors must have meant there wasn’t anything left in the kitty for licensed songs. The game scrapes by with about three. Well, that’s what you’ll think while playing, anyway. Hearing ‘Pusherman’ repeat itself over and over and oooover again will have you stuffing your stash in your ears just to end the pain. Still, at least there are plenty of innocent bystanders to beat the shit out of when it gets too much. Ahh, sweet relief.

The circus is in town. In my excitement I’ve forgotten how to eat ice cream again.

NARC is badly designed, badly flawed, and bugged. There’s talk of it being “open-ended”. Well, if you just want to run aimlessly around a city beating people up, then, yeah, it’s open-ended. You MUST progress through each mission as it comes, and if you fail, you’re plonked right back where you were to do it again. And again. And a-fucking-gain.

And although there are checkpoints, there’s no auto-save option at all. So when you play for two hours and then switch it off in a furious rage, you’ll be even MORE furious when (if) you next turn it on and find all your progress is lost because you didn’t manually save it. So why even have checkpoints in the first place?

Gee, Officer Krupke, we’re very upset. You beat the shit outta that innocent ho.

It does have a few small bright spots. My favourite was hearing a scream, running round the corner to investigate and finding myself blundering into what appeared to be impromptu performances of ‘West Side Story’. The pedestrians are all programmed to act the same way, and their choreographed outrage causes a “What the fuck?” chuckle the first couple of times you see it. And I did find it perversely amusing when I beat a drug dealer to death and a passing bystander was so horrified that she vomited. Simple things please simple minds.

“Which fucking idiot decided this would be a good idea?”

Maybe if you’re high you’ll get the most out of this game. By ‘most’, I mean ‘something’. The only addictive substance I ingested before playing was alcohol, and sadly not in enough of a quantity to enhance NARC any.

An update of NARC is a good idea. This update is not. There are millions of ‘mature’ adult gamers in the world today and it’s insulting to think that Midway think they’re doing us a favour with this crap. NARC isn’t a game for mature adults, it’s a game for fuckwitted kids who think they’re adults.

“You want some shit?” drawls a bored-sounding Michael Madsen at one point. Got plenty right here, cheers, mate.

June 2005

Comments.