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And welcome to Play Comics, where once again, we are here looking at a video game based on a comic property. Kind of we'll get there and how it represents that source material. And today I am really excited because I have somebody who is really excited to be here. And I know I say that, like people aren't anyway, but they usually are. Today we have Ryan Plachetti here from Don't Wreck Yourself. And we are looking at RoboCop versus Terminator. And I know I said kind of we're going to get there, but it's worth it, I promise. But Ryan, before all that, how are you today?
You know, I'm doing great. I sat my wife down for just a real heart to heart over RoboCop this morning. She had never seen the film and I wanted to get my last minute airbrush to my brain so make sure I had all the details right. And it really holds up well, I.
Mean, it is the story of a capitalist dream where somebody dies and then they still go to work. What more do you need?
And they use him for. And technically speaking, RoboCop's a scab in that movie because the police union does go on strike and he continues to prosecute the war against crime.
It's everything that some people in the world want to see happen.
Well, it's so I feel like we've already jumped in. RoboCop is such a predictive film. So many of the things that they're making fun of in that movie have come to pass. The film opens up pretty much with an advertisement for artificial hearts and they start talking about, like, sport hearts, like Yamaha hearts. And if you fast forward to today, we have pharmaceutical ads all the time. It's not necessarily the artificial heart business that's knocking down our door and shaking us by the lapel, saying, hey, you need to use our product. It's the pharmaceutical industry, which is actually probably way worse.
Oh, definitely way worse. I can understand what a heart does. I can understand what different muscles do and everything. I don't need to be going and asking my doctor about a specific pill for this disease. I didn't realize I had.
Yeah. And the, the thing with an artificial heart is you don't just, you don't you don't look at this commercial for an artificial heart and be like, I want to rip out a perfectly good heart. Whereas pharmaceutical companies are sort of giving you a, a promise that a simple pill can solve all of your issues. And that's not generally the case. Just like privatization of public goods and services aren't going to solve all of your crime problems, as evidenced by the OCP takeover of the police station or the police force in Old Detroit.
I bet we have a lot of confused people here on why are we looking at RoboCop? Isn't RoboCop just a movie? And what is Terminator going here? And isn't Terminator just a movie? And how do those things go together? And I thought that too, like, perfectly honest with you. I was questioning whether I was going to put this on the list because really I know there's comics that exist and I'm like, okay, I know there's comics, that's fine. But normally I'm like, everything originated in the comics and we'll go from there. And then I saw the miniseries that this is based on and I said, I don't care anymore. This is going on the list because you have a Frank Miller written story and Walt Simonson art and yeah, I don't care anymore.
Frank Miller. I mean, I'll tell you straight up, full disclosure to all of your listeners. I'm not a comic book guy. I'm one of those people that grew up with comic books around him. I understood their, their appeal. I enjoyed comic books, but, but I didn't really have the money to collect them and I wasn't able to follow what was in the story. So a lot of what I got was just, you know, my comic book experience growing up was collecting Marvel cards because I could afford those and they didn't change that often. And of course, watching the X Men series and the Spider man series on, I believe it was Fox at the time. So that's kind of my comic book background. And every now and again I would buy something that looked interesting. And crossover event comics were actually kind of my favorite because they were usually standalone miniseries that you could just grab and read through. And it's a self contained story. You don't need to necessarily because they're combining two intellectual properties. You don't need to think too hard. I had a Batman versus Spawn comic. I loved it.
That's one reason why I just said, screw it, we're going to put this on because you don't need to really know much more than the super basic Terminator, the super basic RoboCop. And just knowing that these two mixed together like that are going to be fun. And I mean, spoiler alert for everybody. It is a ton of fun looking at the story.
And it's a ton of robots and you can't go wrong with robots.
And because the robots. You don't have to edit it for Europe, so all the robots can still die.
I have no idea what they did with these films in Europe because there's a lot of people getting blown away now. What's kind of interesting is these guys exist in a sort of expanded universe of crossovers. And RoboCop doesn't get a ton of crossovers. Terminator, tons of crossovers. So there's like Alien vs Predator, Alien vs Predator vs Terminator, Terminator vs Robocop. So they're all kind of tied in together. And it's because they all share similar themes. And the dark world of Terminator could easily just be the west coast of the world that RoboCop exists in, as long as it's confined to the 1980s.
That's the fun part, I think, because there isn't a ton of work having to make them fit together. It's just cool they're together now.
Yeah, here's technology run amok. And then here is the result of technology running amok. But while a lot of the moving pieces are really similar, there was actually some concern with the people who were making RoboCop that James Cameron may have thought that they copied him, but the fact is they didn't copy James Cameron. They were actually copying Blade Runner. So the writer for RoboCop was actually near the set of Blade Runner when they were working at the. They were working at one of the studios as a script reader. And so he's on the set and he says, oh, what's this movie about? And they say, oh, it's about a robot. And they're like, oh, really? A robot? Where? What's the robot? Then they pointed to, I guess, Daryl Hannah or one of the other. One of the other synthetic people in that film said, there's the robot that's not a robot. And that's kind of the seed of where RoboCop starts. And if anything, I think you could argue that James Cameron ends up ripping off RoboCop. It's kind of the other way around because RoboCop is a machine with a human core and the Terminator is a human with a machine core. But when you get to RoboCop 2, what do you have? You have a. You have A human machine hybrid, a cyborg trying to discover its humanity. Like that's the, that's the entire arc in Terminator 2. Terminator 2 is more like Robocop than Robocop is like Terminator.
I'm gonna have to go back and rewatch all these movies because it has been forever since I've seen them.
The good news is every single one of them holds up for at least the first movie. I did not go back and review RoboCop 2, 3 or the fourth RoboCop movie that had a subtitle instead of a number. Nor did I revisit the reboot from 2012, I think. But there was something inherently wrong with that because so much of what made RoboCop great was actually like the writing and the acting and the direction when they put that film together. It could have been really, really, really bad. Can you, can you imagine a low budget RoboCop. RoboCop had. RoboCop blew through its budget when they were producing it. So just be glad that we didn't get, you know, a guy dressed in buckets running around shooting at people. They actually put a lot of money and effort and thought into the art design. And every little single piece of that movie was taken seriously, which it would have been really easy to not take that subject matter seriously. And the result is some really great acting, particularly on the part of Peter Weller, who managed to emote and create a sympathetic protagonist with real pathos while only being able to see about 3 to 4 inches of his face.
So this game here we're looking at, it's based on a Dark Horse 4 issue miniseries, which, four issues, that is not a big commitment if anybody ever wanted to go check it out. And the fact that it's Dark Horse, it's a publisher that's still around, so you should be able to get your hands on it one way or another. And they're, they're big enough that it's not like it's super low print run or anything. Plus it was made in the early 90s when everybody was thinking that comics were going to make you rich and pay for the rest of your life. So I'm sure they printed like 50 billion copies of it.
Well, I like to think that we are richer for them having done that. What's even more interesting is they had this really great comic run headed up by Frank Miller, who, you know, if there's anybody who can represent the anti Reagan, anti Thatcher sentiment of underground comics of the 80s and 90s, it's Frank Miller. I mean you look at his runs with some of the characters, Batman, Daredevil, the Punisher, they all have a streak of, one, they're extraordinarily dark stories, and two, they really challenge notions of authoritarianism. And RoboCop is very much about that. And to an extent, Terminator is kind of about that too. But what's really nice here is not only do we get to review one game, but we actually get to review two games. Because they came out with RoboCop versus Terminator on the SNES and the Genesis, and they had two completely separate development teams. In spite of having a lot of common elements, they didn't get to actually read the comics ahead of time. So they had kind of a summary of kind of what the story was about. And the SNES version does a really nice job of staying closer to the comic and truer to the comic. Like, even the cutscenes in that game are done up as comic panels, whereas the Genesis game, the story seems like kind of an afterthought. You just get the. You just get the scrolling intro at the top of the game. So the fact that we have not only we've got four issues of a comic book, we also have two different video games that we get to play.
The super basic plot of the comic. And I'm saying super basic because this is going to be super, super basic high level overview is some of the resistance people from Terminator side realized that RoboCop had something to do with Skynet and all of the Terminators getting made. So they go back in time, try to take out RoboCop, and then everything blows up from there.
And the games definitely kind of fall into that route. Both games center RoboCop as being an incremental step towards the takeover of Skynet. But the thing that I love about Terminator movies is every single Terminator movie, every single Terminator story, is effectively a reboot because Terminator 1 ends, you've saved Sarah Connor. Well, Terminator 2 starts, you shouldn't have a Terminator 2. If Terminator 1 worked. All the Terminator films after that are effectively a reboot, saying, well, what happened in the previous film almost doesn't matter because the Terminators have a new plan. Skynet is sort of this inevitability, has this inevitability about it. Not unlike, say, some of the figures in RoboCop where there is a sense of inevitability about the commodification of everything and the capitalist takeover of everything.
Well, on that note, I think we're going to go have an existential breakdown over the downfall of the humanity side of society. Well, I dropped some promos for a few other things.
Hey, welcome to the Last Comic Shop Podcast. A comic book podcast that actually talks about about comics. Yep.
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Lots of times it's just comic books and sound effects.
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You know all those enthusiastic international film podcasts. Yeah, this isn't one of those. Welcome to review it yourself. The podcast with the sigh film reviews with no politics, no pandering, and absolutely no point. No wacky intros, no segments, no blaring music. Just a rather pessimistic Englishman talking about films with a guest. You can tell why no one's listening, can't you? That was some great stuff to check out. But first, let's finish up here. So Ryan, you have no idea how excited I am to look at this one with you.
I was pretty excited when I saw this on the list of topics I think I told you in my first communication to you about coming on and doing this episode. My only experience with this was a love of the franchises involved and I think I played a demo in store when the game first came out and my family completely skipped the Super Nintendo Genesis era of games. I went straight from an NES to an N64. So this game was never available for me to play at home. So being able to go back now as a 40 year old man and locate this much desired game in both of its forms available through like Mini Arcade and other sites was an absolute treat. I got to go back and play something that I literally missed out on as a child. I got to go back in time like a Terminator character.
So glad I could help you do that. Like you said before, this one was developed so many different ways. On the Genesis you had Virgin Games. On the Game Gear, the Master System you had NMS Software. On the Super Nintendo you had Interplay and on the Game Boy you had unexpected development. They were all published by Virgin Interactive though.
Yeah. So getting and like I said to prepare for this, I went ahead and I played the Genesis game and I played the Super NES game and I read through some of the some of the creator notes and the guys who were behind the game wanted to do something bloody in Fact, the Genesis game was awarded bloodiest game of the year, which is really fitting because the movies that it's based on are pretty bloody. Especially RoboCop, which, for lack of a better word, bathed the story in blood as a commentary on the use of violence in entertainment. Like it was a parody of itself and the genre. So I felt like that part of that little, almost juvenile attention to the detail of blood and gore in the game is very true to the source material. It's something that translates extraordinarily well.
Okay, so I totally believe you that this could be bloodiest game of the year, but do you realize how insane.
That is compared to what other games came out that year? This is probably more your wheelhouse than mine.
I'm glad you asked, because I was going to tell you anyway. Mortal Kombat 2.
Okay, that was pretty darn bloody. Splatterhouse 3 has the word splatter right in the title. I assume that's not some sort of pool fun game where your cute squids squirting ink at each other. That is a no.
That is full on horror. Let's go like, platformy. It's been a while since I've played that one, but it's very bloody. Mutant League Football, which granted is not really blood because they're mutants and stuff, but it's pretty violent.
I've read X Men. I'm pretty sure mutants are people, too.
These are different mutants.
These are like Fallout mutants.
Yeah, if you're going to get bloodiest game of the year, that's some good stuff to beat out.
It is. You know, maybe there's some politics at play, but I think it the kill count of just playing through the first few levels of the Genesis game. You do kill a lot of people. The game is absolutely run and gun. You may as well just keep your gun firing the entire time. There are no civilians available to hit, so everybody that you kill is a bad guy, which is how I think. I'm pretty sure that's just how police reports work.
Yeah, that's pretty much true.
Not to take you down a possibly unwanted political route on your podcast.
No, I'm with you 100% there. Especially in the world that they made for RoboCop. Oh, yeah, that is pretty much dead on and not too wrong in our world for a lot of places.
Yeah. And that's the thing is, like, the cops are, generally speaking, in RoboCop. In RoboCop, the police are generally sympathetic characters. They're jaded, they're angry, but they're literally dying. In the streets, as it turns out, Partly because OCP is manipulating crime in an area in order to make room for their newly devised Delta City. Sorry, I had a thought about police and I lost it.
Did you lose it or did somebody break into your head and take it? Because it must have been a criminal, otherwise why would it have been taken?
That's a different Paul Verhoeven film, Total Recall, to my knowledge. I don't think my thoughts are that good that they need to be dwelled upon and stolen. But yeah, generally speaking, the police are very positive characters in the. In the RoboCop films. But I wouldn't describe the film itself as being necessarily pro cop. I think it's telling that the screenwriters. I remembered my thought, by the way. I think it's telling that the screenwriters actually named all the police officers on the force after serial killers. The one that stands out as being the most blatant is Officer Manson, named after Charles Manson. So the police aren't necessarily given a clean bill of health in this satire in the parody element of the film.
And then the plot of the games gets to work on even more. Like what has been set up in the comics. From what I was seeing, there were people saying they weren't allowed to use plot elements from the comics just because of how the license worked. Yeah, I'm more inclined to believe where you were saying earlier, that the comics just weren't something that they saw. So it's not like they knew the plot elements anyway.
Yeah, I got the impression that they had access to like the basic idea that the. That the Terminators required robocop to interface with Skynet in order to basically make the jump to general AI. But at the same time, the SNES version had the character Flo in it, and Flo is the main character in the comics also. So, I mean, they clearly had access to at least some of it or stuff that they were able to add in after the fact and just kind of plug in as cutscenes. So. And maybe the format that they used was conducive to that, because the cutscenes are, like I said, they're just panels that show up comic panels and then you press a button and advances to the next panel.
I love those comic style cutscenes when they do that, especially in these older games like this, where you're not going to get good voice acting or anything.
Yeah.
So having something like those comic panel cutscenes to push the story along gets things in there that you don't really need to Play through. But it's good to know that it happened for the purpose of the story. That's something that I really like and I'm sure will never be ruined by any game ever.
Even with the 30 years between. Even with the 30 years transpiring between then and now. It has never been ruined by any game ever.
Spoiler alert. It will be ruined. I don't know what the order of these releases are going to be. So you either know what I'm talking about or will know what I'm talking about.
I know a lot of comic games have relied on that. Have attempted to rely on that format to varying degrees of effect. Usually it depends on how good the game is. But I mean, I played some. I've played some pretty rough comic games before.
And like you were saying before, too, I love that this is essentially two different games.
Yeah.
Not as different as, like the Aladdin games, which are super, very different. This is more like somebody had already designed the game and they just gave it to two different teams to make it instead of telling two different teams. Make your game from scratch.
Yeah, and you can absolutely see that in the way that the levels and the types of obstacles they come across. I think they both progress more or less in the same way. So the first level is like Streets of Detroit. Second level is, you know, some sort of industrial setting. And you have pipes to. You have pipes that you're going to use to jungle gym your way across obstacles, and they have flames spouting from nozzles on the ceiling. But the actual execution, the animation, even the art design is completely different between the two games.
I was watching a snesdrunk video on whether this game is worth playing today. And, you know, even he was saying, yeah, the Super Nintendo one is garbage, but the Genesis one is really good, so go play that one instead. I don't know if I fully agree on his conclusion there with the Super Nintendo version being garbage, but, you know, I don't agree.
I thought the. Like, I agree that the Genesis game is. It's smoother. Like, the gameplay is better in terms of, you know, the way your character moves and reacts and interacts with the environment. But I thought the NES game looked better in terms of the art design and it felt like a story, whereas the Genesis game did not. And I'm a very story driven. Like, I like RPGs, I like, I like media that has really dense and thoughtful production. And I thought that visually the SNES game was better and the way it delivered the story was better. The Genesis game was I felt all over the place in terms of levels of difficulty and the animation style just didn't seem as true to the source material.
Now imagine if we could take all the best parts of both of those games and squish them together into a single game.
You mean like make one. Just one game.
Yeah.
What a novel idea.
I know. But if you could take the art and everything from the Super Nintendo one and the just complete Gunstar Heroes style of gameplay from the Genesis 1, then you'd have Gunstar Heroes. So I guess I'm glad that they.
Didn'T reskinned as RoboCop versus Terminator, which I think would be a huge plus.
That is true.
And you can also see some places where they've certainly borrowed from other media. I read that the designers, at least for the Genesis version, were interested in incorporating elements because they're like, well, what makes Contra fun? And then they just stole the guns and the multidirectional shooting and then they added a heaping helping of blood and there's your game. That said, maybe I'm just like, I know I said that I like the SNES game better. I think it's because I was able to beat the ED 209 unit in the SNES game right down to when you. When you blow up his top half, his legs, keep walking. I couldn't kill it in the Genesis version, so I quit. The game was too hard for me. So I don't know if they had that same touch of detail. But like I said, I really preferred the SNES game in terms of viewing it in light of the other media that it's built around.
Everything with this one, it's almost like when you see the idea of it, I think it's. Here's this idea that a 12 year old had. There's no way this can work, right? Like there's no way this can work. And then it does.
I was 11 years old when this game came out and I can confirm it does work. I was smitten with the game to the point that when I saw it on your list, I said I need to revisit that because I missed out. That was one of Those cravings that 11 year old me had. It's right up there with regret for not seeing the original Super Mario Bros. Live action film in the theater. And I mean, it got to the point where because it had been playing at the drive thru near my house. I was living in 29 Palms, California at the time. I reminded my mother so many times that we should have gone to see it. That she told me to shut up. And not in like an abusive way, but in like a please, I'm tired and I'm a parent, so I know the feeling. And the please stop bringing this up. It's no longer in the theaters. And like, this is not a regret that grips her as a parent.
I totally understand your side of all of this.
So, yeah, RoboCop versus Terminator for me was the one that got away. And now as an adult, I get to enjoy it. And the cool factor and the crossover factor is what makes it really. What really sells it for me and still makes it interesting.
And the fact that they didn't just say, oh, they run into each other and fight. I like the fact that they took the story and actually made a reason for them to be together. And it actually makes sense. And I can see in some alternate world where they were actually written together on purpose that way.
Yeah, like one of the catchphrases for the Terminator franchise is fate is not written. And that's kind of what makes the whole thing work because you can have an infinite number of Terminator stories with an infinite number of timelines and they always make sense in the context of the original. So RoboCop versus Terminator is a very natural crossover. Effectively, you have placed RoboCop into the role of the savior figure in the Terminator franchise, which is interesting because both franchises have elements of Christ like figures. So John Connor JC is this future resistance leader who sends a guy back in time to protect his mom, and then that guy ends up becoming John Connor's father, creating a self perpetuating loop where he is effectively made himself. And in the Terminator franchise, Paul Verhoeven the director, or I'm sorry, in the RoboCop franchise, Paul Verhoeven the director, wanted RoboCop to be a Christ like figure. The torturous execution of Officer Alex Murphy at the hands of Clarence Boedecker's gang, described by Verhoeven as a crucifixion. Even at the end when they have that showdown in that rusty puddle of water In a mill, RoboCop is literally walking on water. So he gets executed, he comes back, and then through the use of high powered weaponry, brings peace to the city of Detroit. So I thought it was interesting because they both had those elements and they were able to intertwine them and just make the central Christ like figure in Robocop vs Terminator be the same central Christ like figure that Robocop and Terminator already have in Place, even to the point of him going to the future to rebuild himself, much like John Connor went to the past to rebuild himself. So these ideas of self creation and what's that called? Prothenogenesis, they ring through both stories. And those common elements are what fuse the ideas to create a seamless reality for this game and of course, the comic book series that it's based on.
What do you think this game really gets right, looking at both the comic series and the Robocop and Terminator franchises that the comic series is based on?
Well, I mean, the timeframe that the games are coming out in, obviously there are limitations to the medium. What they get right, like I said, particularly the SNES version is kind of that gritty, clunky machinery. And the 16 bit animation, it lends itself to the same type of technology that they were able to use in the 1980s to create these really cool sci fi special effects, which is stop motion. So stop motion always looks a little bit herky, jerky, unnatural. It falls into kind of this uncanny valley. And I think that translates extraordinarily well to the animations in these video game systems. Like that's one of the things that I think that they've gotten really wrong in the later Terminator films and particularly in the RoboCop reboot. Because the way these creatures move, the way these machines move, is necessarily inhuman. And I think that translates well. I think the one downside to the translation of stop motion to animation is that they lose a little bit of the detail that say, Peter Weller brings to the role of RoboCop. Because so much of what he's doing is he's moving in space. So a lot of the movement that Peter Weller does is really intentional in that role. Like the movement of RoboCop. Like if you actually watch him moving around a scene, it's kind of insane. The level of detail that he gets to, the way his, you know, the way his hips pivot, the way his chest moves, the way his arms move, everything is very much in Peter Weller's head. And the moving is intentional. So like, even in this, when you're watching him move through the scenes, a lot of times you'll see his chest turn before his head turns. And that's symbolic of the. The movement of like central processes, central processing, from the head, which is a sensory device, to the chest where all the computer parts are housed. So in that sense, you know, the way he moves indicates the. The fusion of human beings and machinery with the machine being dominant. But another thing you'll notice about RoboCop and Terminator is that they both have that kind of serial killer walk where they are moving unstoppable, slowly, menacingly through a scene, often dispatching people as they go, completely unfazed by the chaos, the turmoil. They're unstoppable forces. And I think that makes sometimes those action sequences from the point of view of RoboCop, even though there's a lot going on in that scene like robocop and Terminator, they're not actually doing a whole heck of a lot. They're just moving through it. Moving through an environment, shooting guns and being unstopped by bullets. And I don't think that necessarily translates well into a video game because nobody wants to play a slow character slowly moving through unstoppable until they get to the end. So I think in that sense they had to abandon some of the realism of the game in order to make something that was playable in a format that would be familiar to gamers at that point in time.
And I really try not to hold gameplay, things like that against them when they're making this. What they did do was RoboCop still feels like a slower moving, heavier character. You're not getting your double triple jumps off the air, being able to jump up the building like Batman or anything. You're. You're going slow, you're going. But you're going fast enough for gameplay. You're not able to jump up onto the top of a building in one go, but you're able to jump high enough to do what you need to do. And it's all obvious as you're playing this. Yeah, I can jump on that. Or no, I'm going to have to find a step in the middle there so it works. And it still feels like you're playing Wario instead of playing Luigi.
No, I got you completely though. I was upset on the Super NES version when I came across a six foot tall wooden box and it was completely blocking my path and I had to go climb a building. Go climb a building, go to the roof of the building and find power lines to shimmy across as opposed to just punching through the wooden block. Which would be the RoboCop answer to that.
Yeah, I can see where that part would be a problem. Along those lines, what do you think this game really gets wrong, looking at the franchises?
Oh, gosh, I honestly, I don't think it got much wrong. The story makes sense. And for me that's the most important thing is the story makes sense. I think the story makes sense. You know, in the big picture stuff, what I think it misses out on is some of the character impact that both of these films, both of the films that they're based on have. And that I know was incorporated very heavily into the comic. So the comic deals a lot with RoboCop essentially not wanting to be real anymore. Like, he does not. RoboCop does not want to exist. And that's like, he's an abomination. He's a victim of a system that was farming police officers to make robocop. And I think that the comic really captures that. But I think that, you know, issues of suicide probably didn't play. Probably never made it onto the short list of themes that they wanted to explore in a 16 bit video game. That said, RoboCop does get destroyed and he's able to rebuild himself in Skynet's future factory in order to take on Skynet in the Terminator future. It's cool. Like, it's a really cool idea. And I think that the. I think it works about as well as any mainstream canonical Terminator story.
16 bit games, I can tell you from experience, don't ask me how I know this, are like three or four megabytes and you can fit them on a three and a half inch floppy along with an emulator and maybe in theory play them at your school library. Totally theoretical, of course, but like, you've only got so much room to work with.
Yeah.
And it's not like now where you can say, okay, we're gonna fit as much of the game on the disc as we can and then you download more stuff or more realistically, we're gonna realize we should have done that before and we rushed the game out. So go get the finished product later. And you can't exactly get a second cartridge either.
Yeah, I think that kind of speaks to the. Not just the limitations of the game design, but I think it also speaks to how we ended up with, what did you say? Four different versions of the game and a fifth version and the NES version that was never finished and released. So they actually made five different versions of this game. Can you imagine that happening in like a AAA studio today? Absolutely not. They're not going to make five versions of the Elder Scrolls. They're not going to make Grand Theft Auto 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 and release them at the same time.
It's absolutely the closest we get now. Seems to be like this console gets this character as an extra character and it's exclusive to that console.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Assassin. The Assassin's Creed franchise might be the closest to actually just making the same game over and over and over again. And I don't mean that in a bad way. It's a very, very fun game. But all they do is they just, they port it into a new setting and now it's, now it's a fresh game. So not to. But I just can't imagine a AAA studio at this point making five different versions of the game. Like you said, console exclusive content, platform exclusive content. Absolutely. But a completely different design team with as much money as they spend on top games now, absolutely impossible. So in some respects the technology has limited the creativity because we actually got effectively now because they pirated the NES version, we effectively got five different versions of this game to choose from instead of one perfected version. And, and you know that that studio system that we have today doesn't always create good games. In fact, sometimes those designs, design decisions made because games are so expensive end up killing the game. I did a little bit of, I worked on a, I worked on a video game project as a writer. So like I can appreciate the limitations that you end up with when you have a particular, when you have a particular engine that you're using or a particular format for the game. I was fortunate to be working on a role playing game with a lot of deep conversation trees. But at the same time those conversation trees, as I was designing them, I always had, here's the good response, the bad response, the neutral response, the selfish response. And you have to have an underlying formula or structure, a meta structure that you can kind of hang everything off of so that way you don't drive yourself insane going down rabbit holes, which is something that I appreciate in these early games. RoboCop versus Terminator. I can criticize it for not grappling with the humanity of RoboCop or the Greater cultural implications of Ronald Reagan's America. But at the end of the day, I think they did a really good job with what they had to work with.
If you knew somebody who really wanted to get into RoboCop and or Terminator, would you give them this game as a bit of a primer course?
That's a great question. I think I'd give them the comics because I think the comic does enough to capture elements from both. I think that the abstraction that occurs as you turn a, you know, a graphic novel into a 16 bit video game, I think a lot of it gets lost in translation. And the stuff that I really love about these stories are the really high minded philosophical elements you know, I love that RoboCop and Terminator, although they appear to be these really simple, like, this guy's strong, those guys weak. Even though it seems really simple on the surface, there's a lot that's underlying there and a lot of things that are speaking to social concerns and technological concerns. You know, these are very thoughtful sci fi products. And in that respect, I don't think that the game would be the best introduction to somebody to either of these franchises. I think, however, it is a wonderful supplement.
Yeah, I think this is. They've had to simplify everything too much for this to be a good introduction. Totally with you on that. I don't want to not give it to them. Like, if they ask me if they should play it, like, yeah, sure, have at it. But I'm not going to be the one to bring it up.
Yeah. And I think the other thing is, if you look at the way even both of these games, both versions of the game tell this story. The game is coming from a place of you already knowing, if not the comics, then the underlying intellectual property. You know, they are picking up. Terminators have gone back in time to stop RoboCop. You already know who Terminators are when you pick up this game is the assumption. And you already know who RoboCop is. And I think for that reason alone, it is not a good introduction. You're not getting a RoboCop origin story. You're not getting a Terminator origin story. You're picking up this content in media res.
And finally, if you're able to film your own version of RoboCop versus Terminator, which Muppet is playing RoboCop and which Muppet is playing Terminator?
Oh, well, this one's easy, I think, for RoboCop because of how serious he is, how wooden he is, and how just how big he is. The. The big blue bird with the. With the beak and the unibrow.
Oh, Sam the eagle. Heck, yeah.
Sam the eagle. Yes. Is RoboCop. Like, you can just imagine. You can just imagine him saying, dead or alive, you're coming with me. It works. As for the Terminator, what's the. It's not going to be the. It's got to be Super Grover. No, Super Grover is RoboCop. I got it. I think I got it backwards. Sam the eagle is the Terminator and Super Grover is RoboCop because he's already got the metal visor and helmet.
I think we have a winner.
I think so. And he has those. Those strong, angular features like Peter Weller does. It's perfect for the Robocop helmet. Nice. And I think Grover has probably some of the most expressive lips in the Muppet Kingdom, so I think he'll be able to carry the more human elements of the role.
Well, you can't end on a better note than that, Ryan. If people want to hear more from you, where else can they find you? Around the Internet?
All right, well, you will be able to find me Weekly. Actually, we just started publication again on Don't Wreck Yourself. It's a podcast. We're hoping to get some video content out there soon. But that is a podcast where we look at memes and claims on the Internet, we delve into topics, and we do the research and we tell you all about it. It's actually not unlike this show, except that we'll cover literally anything. The more uncertain, the better. The most recent topic that we covered in our newest episode is actually whether or not there was actually a poodle shaving event in the 1900 Paris Olympics. So we cover a lot of great topics. A lot of it's really kind of quirky and out there. And just some warnings, not all episodes are appropriate for everybody. There are, in fact, some bad words you can find us just search Don't Wreck Yourself on the podcatcher of your choice. And you can also find us@recyourpod.com and reckyourpod on most of our socials.
And because I'm not a robot and I'm sure that the people listening aren't robots, we'll have links down in the show notes because clicking links is so much easier than accessing your memory banks and hoping they didn't get corrupted.
We're not robots yet, but many of our listeners may be if you believe in Dead Internet theory, which is exactly the sort of thing that we would cover on our show.
As always, if you want to hear more from me, the best way to do that is to head on over to playcomics.com where there's links to all the social media things, because I'm pretty sure Blue sky and Threads is where I'm going to settle. But yeah, that. That's still kind of a thing to be determined if you want to be on the show yourself. Then you can also find a list of what I'm looking to get booked the soonest over on Play Comics. There's a link down in the show notes here, too, if you want to just take a link directly there. You know, all that fun stuff. If you want to help support the show, then you can be like Dan McMahon and Ono lit class and give the show money because it does cost money to do this. Or, you know, just share the show with your friends or your enemies or other people you think would like it or anything like that. Don't forget, the Play Comics is a part of the Gunageek.com network, home to such other wonderful shows as Legends of shield, where right now we're looking at what if and what if we did that? You don't even have to wonder because that's what we're doing and it's really fun. And Papa SP is back for this part, so yay. I don't know if he knows that I call him that. He should. I don't try to hide it. I just honestly don't know if he knows that. If you like the music that I'm really talking on top of right now, then head on over to BackingTrack GG, where you can find all kinds of music for your own creative projects and they're free to use. And I'm not gonna tell you what this one is because I don't want you to use it, even though I can't stop you. It's really good, though, isn't it? So you should go check it out. Most of all, though, just grab a game, grab a stack of comics, and go find yourself a new favorite character.
I think my laundry smells like a wet dog and I'm not okay with it. We got a dog recently and it's really playing havoc.
Is it cute, though?
Oh, she's adorable. 16 bit. I almost said aminations.