RoboCop Versus The Terminator by Walter Simonson

RoboCop Versus The Terminator - VIOLENCE MODE

Replay Burners' latest playthrough vid is especially exciting. This longplay of the Mega Drive / Genesis version of RoboCop Versus The Terminator takes place with the violence mode cheat code activated - this optional input introduces extra enemies to the game, including Terminator dogs in the future and female criminals in the present; RoboCop can also catch on fire, forcing the player to either shoot a fire hydrant or hunt down an automatic sprinkler system. That's not all though, the player behind the run, Jarl HL 3.0, makes a bee line for the game's many hidden stages, reminding me of a long-held query of my own. When you finish RoboCop Versus The Terminator, the closing credits ask you if you are sure you have found all the game's secret levels. This pointed needling always made me wonder if there was an alternative credit sequence that would then congratulate the player for finding all of the game's concealed areas? 

Since I was 12 when the game came out, I had more than enough time to play then replay this game, pushing RoboCop up against every wall and surface to see if they could be passed through. Make it into one of these offscreen spaces and (sometimes) a secret stage could be accessed by pressing up on the d-pad. Happily Jarl, on this impressively thorough run, doesn't discover any more areas than I had done myself. The hidden OCP office packed with Terminator found in the second stage or the Secret Remote Base - complete with background tile designs shamelessly cribbed from the industrial landscapes seen in Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira - were, I think, relatively well known but Jarl even hits areas I remember thinking were particularly obscure, such as the Secret Streets Exit found in the OCP building or the olive coloured, alternative version of Delta City. Watching today, these secret stages offer a slightly more experimental approach to the game, usually by packing the area with enough enemies to simulate a sort of bullet hell but also, in the case of an unfinished, palette swapped city, by focusing the level around a trepidatious, vertical, progression. 

Mortal Kombat 11 - THE CREATOR FIRES ON THEM, IT IS MADNESS

After 25 years away, Frank Miller and Walter Simonson's incomparable franchise throw-down, RoboCop Versus The Terminator, returns to video games via Mortal Kombat 11's latest DLC update, Aftermath.

RoboCop Versus The Terminator #2 by Walter Simonson

RoboCop Versus The Terminator #1 by Walter Simonson

ROBOCOP VERSUS THE TERMINATOR

RoboCop by Walter Simonson

Genocide City

Sonic the Hedgehog 2's rushed development time meant many levels and concepts had to be discarded along the way. Among these deleted stages is the worrying sounding Genocide City, a single techno-maze stage that was to be found late in the game. Much of the work done structuring this level ended up being used in the release version for the third act of Metropolis Zone. Still, the weirdly atypical name struck a cord with fans, particularly the Sonic hack scene.

A fan designed version of Genocide City appears in Esrael Neto's Sonic 2 Delta, there the stage uses Chemical Plant's industrial loop de loop geography suspended in space. Disaster Year's favourite interpretation though is the one found in Sonic Hachelle-Bee's Sonic 2 Long Version, Hachelle-Bee imagines the level as a brick cityscape, dwarfed by scrolling castle-scrapers, and adorned with Aztec monster-mouths. This Genocide City resembles the ruin corners of Mega Drive RoboCop Versus The Terminator, particularly the opening stages set in that fiction's dilapidated Old Detroit. Ghosts haunt doorways in Genocide City, the murdered populace infrequently appearing as strung-up mummies dried to a muddy brown. Escape Sonic!