Insert Lots of Coins! - Robocop (Data East 1988)

A bit of a personal milestone here..This piece of coin swallowing awesomeness has the distinction of being the first coin-op game I ever completed....it probably cost me over a hundred quid like but my 9 year old self was proper chuffed because no one else I know of ever managed it before the advent of emulation...

This game first showed up in the pub my mum helped run in late 1988, a full year after the equally awesome film came out, where it looked like this..

There were a couple of different versions of this knocking about, including a 2 player version, but for the most part, this game was a single player affair.

The gameplay was ridiculously simple, you, playing as Robocop, had to move from left to right through various stages in old Detroit, shooting and punching the various thugs, pugs, punks, rapists (recreating the famous scene from the film where Robo shoots a rapist in the pods), burglars, murderers, bank robbers, chainsaw weilding assholes etc you came across, before then squaring off against en end of level boss, which more often than not would be some gangsters and a vehicle, or an ED-209 of some description, which progressively got tougher and had more weapons as the game went on, but all of which would settle into a nice predictable pattern so you could plan your attacks accordingly.

Now, while this was a pretty much run of the mill shooter, similar in gameplay to Contra/Probotector, insofar as you only had one life to get things done, you did have a health bar, which you could refill by picking up jars of baby food that appear occasionally throughout levels, and by successfully completing the shooting galley bonus rounds, so you didn't always have to worry about getting hit occasionally, in fact, some parts of the game, its unavoidable, especially on the last level in the OCP building where you are confronted with a horde of machine gun and grenade wielding thugs, laser turrets, mortar firing robots, laser barriers and spikes that rise out of the floor (yeah, you remember that bit from the film, right?).
Thankfully though, Robo can pick up different weapons. you start the game with your basic pistol, but soon enough, youll find a 3-way spread gun, a "double shot" pistol that can penetrate through multiple enemies, and finally, the cobra assault cannon, which can penetrate through enemies, has a small area of effect, and can cause serious damage to heavilly armoured foes..state of the art bang bang!..problem is with these upgrade, they only have a limited amount of ammuntion, so you have to be really careful when you decide to hit that fire button.

Throughout play, there are also multiple instances of digitized voice effects from the film, Robo says things like "Your move creep!", "Drop it!" and "Thank you for your co-operation!", all while the Robocop theme plays in the background...ace!

So, to a 9 year old boy,t his game was the epitomy of awesomeness, and the only thing that made it a pain in the ass was having to beg for 10ps to shovel into its hungry coin slot, because this game required a shitload of 10p pieces in order to advance, simply because when the screen starts getting busy, and you havent learned the bad guys patterns, you die a lot, esp after the difficulty curve seriously ramps up once you have gotten past the first 2 levels.

Does this game stand the test of time?, well, yes, its still fun to play, although now its a little unrewarding being as, and i know this might sound weird, you don't get the self satisfaction from knowing that you only had 1 credit and managed to get really far (although that said, even with emulation, I can now complete this game without dying at all).
This game also got ported to various home consoles and computers, but none of them could match the gameplay of the original arcade outing, in fact, it has to be said that this game is pretty much the only example of a good Robocop game in existence, being as pretty much all Robocop games that followed it were crap.

So yeah, the Coin-op Robocop is still a good game, even today.

Pilot erroR - Earth *Star Voyager (1988)

1987 saw "Star Trek: The Next Generation" hit the small screen to much rejoicing, and kickstarted a renewed interest in TV based sci-fi in general.
Disney, wanting a slice of that pie, decided to have a go at making a sci-fi TV series aimed at the teen/young adult market in the form of "Earth *Star Voyager", which originally aired as a 2 part TV movie in their "The Wonderful World of Disney" programming block...

The story begins in the year 2082, where the deep space exploration vessel "Vanguard Explorer" (dunno why, but for some reason all the ships in this film have really odd/complicated names) is drifting in space following a mutiny by its crew. The ships captain, Jake Brown, manages to get to an escape pod and flee his now crippled and useless spacecraft, leaving the mutinous crew to their fate, and probably impending death by suffocation (that's how we deal with mutinous scum round 'ere, ah tells thee!).

Six years pass, and one of the probes launched by the Vanguard Explorer returns data to Earth showing that a planet it has found, which is named "Demeter", could support human life.
As the Earth is now a polluted and overcrowded festering shit hole, the prospect of finding a new Earth type planet appeals to the world government, however the probes data is far from completely accurate, so it is decided to send a specialist deep space explorer ship to the planet..the titular "Earth *Star Voyager".

Thanks to the invention of the "Bauman drive", the round trip time will be a mere 25 years, with 1 year to be spent doing a full planetary survey, making for a total time away of 26 years. With this in mind, the space authority decides that the Earth *Star Voyager will be crewed mainly with cadets and recent graduates, none of whom are over the age of 25, with the ships initial commander being an experienced space commander who will be expected to relinquish his command to the 21 year old Jonathan Hays once he gets a bit too old to effectively command.
Once the survey has been completed and the ship returns to Earth, the long term plan is for a fleet to be constructed to evacuate most of the planets population to Demeter, however it will take about 40 years for all the ships required to be built, so therefore if Demeter isn't suitable, the Earth *Star Voyager can also survey any other planets it comes across on its travels.

With this in mind, the Earth *Star Voyager sets off, but, mere hours after its departure, the captain is killed in an "accident" involving a faulty airlock, and as they later find out, the ship is actually part of an evil plot by traitorous military officers to build the ULTIMATE DOOM WEAPON OF DEATH!!!11!!one!111!!11.

From the minute this film begins, you can easily tell this was a product of the 1980s.
For a start, the Earth *Star Voyager comes complete with extremely complex push button keyboard controls, poor quality vector graphic CRT display screens, hell, two crew spots are reserved for the ships aerobics instructor and the ships psychoanalyst...and then there are mullets, and lots and lots of "big hair" (it can be taken as written that at least one cargo bay on the ship is set aside for storing cans of hair spray and styling mousse).

Because the crew of the ship is made up mostly of teenaged children, the writers made sure they introduced romantic subplots nice and early too, and had the ships original captain mention he could perform marriage ceremonies (they probably had the ships entertainment officer arrange for a prom at some point as well, cuz we all know that all teenage Americans care about is dating, getting married and going to prom with a hot date, you know, cos thats totally bodacious dude).

One thing that wrankled me was that for a large and important mission, using one of Earths newest ships and traveling into unknown space via known hostile territory, the people at the space navy decided that including weapons on the ship wasn't really required above a few hand held laser guns, meaning that when the ship gets attacked, the crew have to cobble together some makeshift weapons, but thats ok, because the crew are all super geniuses and the bastard offspring of B.A Baracus and McGuyver, meaning they can take some spare parts and a roll of duct tape and turn it into a super powerful laser gun or something.

All that said though, I think that should Earth *Star Voyager have been made into an actual series, it would have been a fun watch and somewhat of a guilty pleasure. The pilot episode is a bit of a damp squib, as it seemingly tries to pack in three or four episodes worth of storylines into a 3 hour feature length episode, and doesn't adequately explain some of the things that are going off.

It does get annoying though when you get the smart arsed super kids finding solutions to seemingly impossible situations by more or less pulling ideas out of their assholes, and then getting all smug about it, and, with this being a Disney offering, the few fighting scenes in the film are non violent and a bit rubbish.

Its an entertaining enough way to spend 3 hours though, if you don't have anything else worth doing.

Overall - 7/10

War Of The Worlds - The series (1988-1990)

The War Of The Worlds TV series was first envisaged as a concept in the 1970s by Director George Pal and was intended to be a direct follow on the the 1953 movie, however the series did not make it to screens due to no interest in it.
In 1988 however writer/director Greg Strangis managed to pitch a similar concept which found favour amongst US TV executives who were, at the time, quite keen on making TV series based on successful films, as the same year saw a "Friday the XIII" TV series and a "Nightmare on Elm Street" TV series.

Two full series were made, however there are massive differences in the settings and tone of the second series compared to the first, so much so that barring a couple of shared characters, the second series could be considered to be something entirely different based on a similar premise.

Series 1 (1988-1989)

The back story goes that both the events of the 1953 Film and the 1938 Radio Broadcast were actually real attempted alien invasions, however following the end of the 1953 invasion, the aliens (note - the aliens are not referred to as "martians", as a rule in all episodes, as the concept of life on Mars had long since been disproved and thus useless as a believable plot point) did not die when exposed to Earths bacteria, instead, the aliens entered a state of torpor, and thus, after the 1953 war ended, thousands of "dead" alien bodies were sealed into oil drums and sent to storage areas all over the world, supposedly for scientific research purposes, but in reality they were quickly hidden away along with any spacecraft and artifacts so that the worlds governments could quickly and quietly rebuild and forget about the horrifying events of the invasion.
35 years pass and in present day (1988) a group of environmental terrorists attack and take over a military storage compound, which they intend to hold for ransom due to it being used to store nuclear waste. Unfortunately for them the facility is also one of the places that sleeping aliens are stored, and, in the process of their assault on the facility, the terrorists cause the aliens to become exposed to radioactive waste, which reanimates them. The aliens quickly counter attack, and demonstrate that they have the ability to merge their bodies with a human body, thus allowing them to appear as human (This was actually a cost saving measure so that numerous difficult to produce alien costumes didn't have to be made and maintained, plus it also allowed the aliens to directly influence the plot. It should also be noted that throughout the entire series, the aliens are never seen clearly).

The aliens are discovered when they make a transmission requesting orders from their superiors, and this leads to the introduction of the series' main characters:-

Dr. Harrison Blackwood  (Jared Martin) - The adopted son of Dr. Clayton Forrester and Sylvia van Buren. Harrison is an eccentric scientist who carried on Dr. Forresters work on the aliens, even though after the great cover up no one believed in aliens any more. He becomes head of "The Blackwood Project" a secret group dedicated to finding and stopping the aliens before they take over the world. Blackwoods curiosity quite often gets the team into trouble.

Norton Drake  (Phillip Akin) - A paraplegic computer genius who intercepted the aliens first transmission. (In the pilot episode of the series, Norton sported a faux Caribbean accent, however this was dropped for the series proper, although in the first few episodes he still uses it, however the actor playing him re dubbed his lines in his own voice) Norton, as well as being a top notch research scientist is also an expert hacker, and helps the team get access to information by bypassing governmental "red tape" from time to time with his skills.

Lt.Col Paul Ironhorse  (Paul Chaves) - A US army special forces operative of native American ancestry who serves as the liaison between Dr. Blackwood and the military. Ironhorse is a staunch conservative and generally prefers military action over scientific investigation, putting him at odds with the pacifistic Dr. Blackwood, however over time the two grow to hold a respect for each other.

Suzanne McCullough (Lynda Mason Green) - A Microbiologist and single mother who comes to work for Dr. Blackwood prior to the arrival of the alien threat. Throughout the series Suzanne works on numerous biological methods of identifying or attacking the aliens, as well as finding out more about them. Suzanne is a very "by the numbers" scientist, which causes problems with Blackwoods eccentric approach to science.

The Blackwood team are tasked with researching and finding ways to combat the aliens, however the aliens themselves face numerous problems. Firstly, although they have been resurrected by the radiation, its effect of killing the germs that harm them also causes their bodies to break down from radiation sickness, meaning the aliens can only spend short periods inside a human body before they too begin to disintegrate. Secondly, the aliens do not have access to their advanced weapons or technology this time round, so therefore have to make do with crudely adapted human technology, or hopefully be able to scavenge some of their own equipment from secret storage facilities, or left over from previous visits to Earth.
Over the course of the series the aliens revive more of their own kind and try numerous strategies to subvert and kill mankind, some of which end up being horribly successful (yes that's right, the baddies win sometimes), but the series does end on a fairly high note, as it turns out that humans may have allies from space as well as enemies, although by the end of the series, it is established that an alien colonisation fleet will arrive within a few years.

Series 2 (1989-1990)

Series 2 saw some major changes to the shows format. Firstly, the setting was changed from "present day" to "almost tomorrow", this allowed for the timeline to be moved on to accommodate the arrival of the alien colonisation fleet.
Also, and more bizarrely, the aliens from the first series (the "Mor-Tax") were replaced with another set of completely different aliens, the "Mothren", with little to no explanation given as to why.
Also, Ironhorse and Norton are killed off in the first episode, and instead replaced by a mercenary called John Kincaid (played by a pre-Highlander: The Series Adrian Paul).


In this series, Earth has fallen into a period of chaos and great social upheaval, leading to an almost total breakdown of civilised society.
The Mothren arrive on Earth, and, unlike their predecessors the Mor-Tax, have no trouble whatsoever adapting to the environment, however they find it inconvenient that the humans haven't been massacred, allowing them to begin full colonisation procedures, however, over the course of the series they try to complete their mission of finding a new home world, despite their many internal conflicts.



Overall Thoughts



While the series' original concept, and thus the first series itself was quite good, it completely went to pot with the changes made for the second series.
The first series mixed sci-fi with elements of adventure and horror, and was genuinely scary to me when I first saw this series as an 11 year old, especially some of the gruesome ways that the aliens killed people.
A nice touch was that Jared Martin was instructed to copy actor Gene Barrys mannerisms in his portrayal of Harrison Blackwood, so as to make another link between the film and the series.
Another nice touch was the episode "An eye for an eye", which first aired on the 50th anniversary of Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast and pays tribute to it by having the Blackwood team visit the setting of the radio play and tangling with aliens with help from some of the town militia who fought them during the 1930s.
The series also had a lot of environmentalist themes, as well as some cleverly crafted bits of satire and black comedy, most notably that each episode of series 1 was titled after a biblical quote, which had an ironic connection to the plot for the episode.
Series 2 was just awful, with far too many plot and character changes to make the two series' related in any way, even the episodes of it themselves are boring, save for one episode which involves Blackwood travelling back in time to the 1950s.

This is a good series, so long as you only really watch series 1, well acted, and for the most part well scripted. Some of the special effects are a bit bargain basement, and any instance of alien war machines appearing in the series is simply repurposed footage from the 1953 film, but, even though the program is very 1980s in its stylings, and thus may be a little difficult for younger people to get their head round, it is still watchable and entertaining.

Gorefest - Men Behind The Sun (1988)

If you didn't already know, World War 2 wasn't the most pleasant of times to live in, for every rendition of "We'll Meet Again", there are 10 examples of people being torn limb from limb, for no better reason other than someone just felt like doing it. War is a horrible thing, where the morals of man take second place to violent gratification.

Men Behind The Sun tells the undeniably true story of once such instance of morals becoming fluid during wartime.

Released in 1988, this Hong Kong/Chinese co production tells, albeit in abridged and, surprisingly, sanitised form, the story of Unit 731, one of many special military units formed during World War 2 and tasked with finding better ways to kill people.

The film itself caused some controversy on its release, with the Japanese government protesting to the Chinese government about the film, saying that it represented both an embellishment and an unrealistic portrayal of events, however the film makers refused to listen to the protests, stating that "history is history", part of a quote which is cited at the beginning of the film.

The story itself follows a group of young Japanese military recruits, all of whom have been conscripted into the army youth corps and seconded to field studies with Unit 731, a top secret unit based in the captured territory of Manchuria on the Chinese mainland.
Another subplot runs parallel to the main one showing the problems that the camps commanding officer, Shiro Ishii has upon returning to the command he was previously stripped of, due to other ambitious officers telling tales behind his back.

On their first day, all the boys are sworn to secrecy, and are introduced to the camps real work ("officially", the camp is a logging camp, which doubles as a field hospital) which focuses on finding a way to manufacture a strain of bubonic plague that is much more deadly than normal strains, and then finding a method of delivering it to a target effectively. To this end, prisoners, referred to as "logs" in keeping with the cover story that the camp is used as a lumber mill (historical note - experimental units such as Unit 731 also used other names for prisoners, such as "monkeys", firstly to cover up how many people had been killed in experiments, but also to fulfil the cultural mindset of being discourteous to an enemy that had allowed itself to be captured).

Over the course of the film, various experiments on humans are shown, ranging from experiments where peoples flesh is frozen to test possible treatments for frostbite, to vivisections on live humans (One such scene caused outrage as it appeared to be footage from a real autopsy, however it was later proven to be very good and convincing special effects) , and to people being injected with infected blood in order to stockpile the deadly strain of bubonic plague they are tasked with creating.

The film itself consists of various scenes showing atrocities, strung together with the developing plot and the passage of time showing the run up to the end of the war in the pacific, with the group of conscript boys either embracing the horror, or becoming sickened by it.
The film is very well made, however the subject matter and scenes of depravity depicted on screen are very disturbing, so those who find that sort of thing distasteful should definitely not view this film, being as that no punches are pulled in the film, and, as it so often plays out in real life, the "bad guys" do not receive a comeuppance in some ironic manner, nor at any time do any of the main "bad guys" show any kind of emotion or remorse for anything that they do, no matter how gruesome or depraved.

This is a good film, and an often ignored part of world history, especially where world war 2 is concerned as most "atrocities" are usually linked with the Nazis treatment of people in Europe.