At Least My Mom Thinks I'm Funny...

Okay, okay, I've got a joke for you. You wanna hear a good joke? Okay, here it is:

Electro-Cop

Seriously, I've been trying to keep this to games that were important in my childhood because they were really good. Even Breath of Fire II, despite it's huge problems, was a big influence on my childhood.

Sadly, so was Electro-Cop, uh, well... kind of. I didn't realize it until recently, but this game was terrible. I could explain what it had going for it, or what it did wrong, but really, everything about this game reduces down to one simple aspect of the game.

As you travel around the building that the game takes place in, you run into a number of locked doors. Doors are locked with a four number password, so there's no chance of you guessing them. If you want to unlock a door, you can run an icebreaker program, which will (fairly quickly) run through every possible combination of numbers, eventually stumbling onto the password and unlocking the door.

I know what you're thinking, if you could do this for every door, what's the point of searching out the passwords in the first place? Get this: There are no passwords. You cannot ever get the password for any door in that game ever. Why do they give you the option to input the password manually? You will never use it. Once you've opened a door, it stays open, and the passwords are generated randomly each game, so you can't use them more than once. The end result is: you have to use the ice breaker program on every door in the entire game.

Since running through all ten thousand possible combinations takes a while, the game gives you small mini-games to play while you're waiting. You can solve a 3x3 slide puzzle, or play a bastardized version of asteroids of break out. Cracking the password takes two to three minutes each, and virtually every door in the entire game is locked. I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that in any given game of electro-cop, you spend 75% of your time playing smaller, shittier games!

I know I say this a lot, but who could have possibly given that the thumbs up?! It boggles the mind that someone was able to assemble an entire production team of people who do nothing but play video games developed in the early 70s.

Well guess what, it gets better. If you're lucky enough to solve the slide puzzle, beat all three levels of break out (there are only three levels, yes), or destroy all the asteroids, the game says, “You won. Big deal.” and then starts you over. The game makes fun of you for playing it! Electro-Cop's audacity is... boggling.

It's like the Emperor's New Clothes got condensed into a cartridge for the Atari Lynx, and they're trying to see how much time you have to sink into the game before you realize the game sucks and the makers want to hurt you personally. It's like Andy Kaufman hauled himself out of his grave to make a game, just so you couldn't quite decide for sure if he was making a game, or just attempting to damage people emotionally in an obnoxious piece of performance art. As for me, I choose the latter.