Video Gaming Blog

Submitted by Gaming Briefs and Nostalgia Bits

What we have here is a recording of the video game of Judge Dredd made in 1993. If you’re wondering why you never saw it before, there’s a reason why - it was never released and is only available as a prototype. And while there are some unreleased games that are still quite good (Alpha Denshi’s Block Paradise/Sunshine and Atari’s Dr. Sparkz Lab are good examples), it’s easy to see why this was not. The designers attempted to jerry-build 2-3 different modes of gameplay together here, none of which is particularly satisfying. You can see that a lot of work was put into this very awkwardly designed game too (the shape of the elevator doors in the Willis Power Tower basement is especially crummy), but it’s all just embarrassingly bad as the digitzed design turns out to be. In fact, the game suffers from a problem that a lot of lesser games from the early 1980s did: the designers would push the edge of their hardware’s envelope and would result in a monstrosity.

There may be some attempts at humor in here, but you’d need a bomb detector to identify any of them. For example, after beating Mean Machine Angel, Dredd tells him, “you’re going to jail.” Uh, your honor, is your helmet’s visor so foggy as to not notice that he burst into a bloody mess after you downed him? Shouldn’t that really be “RIP”? And while the line shouted out by the robo-rebel, “I’M LEGLOCK, KING OF THE DROIDS! I’LL SMASH YOU! I’LL BASH YOU! I’LL CRUSH YOU LIKE TOYS!” is amusing, they ruined everything after Dredd says to him post-defeat, “Obstructing the law can be hazardous to your health.” Um, shouldn’t that be “catastrophous to your circuits”? Oh well, Dredd is so mechanical in his own way, I guess you couldn’t blame him for failing to tell that his opponent was too. And if this had been offically released, I figure that I would’ve turned tail and ran after hearing that line from Dredd where he says, “punish the guilty, keep the innocent nervous.” No wonder the source material never appealed to me.

Oh, and isn’t that just splendid: they just had to toss in a cameo by Goro from Mortal Kombat. Aren’t all those rejects from A Clockwork Orange bad enough? And lest we forget to note, the game, as you can see if you’ve viewed the tape to the end, is incomplete - there was obviously meant to be a final boss (okay, maybe not the last one, but still…), but they left it at that and never finished the game’s program. I wonder how much more was left out? No matter, ’cause I’d rather not waste any time playing this flop anyway.

Given how limp the end result of this digitized game is, one could consider this the pinnicle example of where American video game companies screwed up during the early to mid-90s: instead of catching up with their Japanese counterparts in the animated graphics department, they tried to be showoffs with digitized effects, and I might point out that that can cost a lot of money, regardless of how much you’re willing to pay any special actors who participate in the whole project. By the time Midway - and even Atari, which had also tried a few of these things - realized that, however, and returned to working more on animation again, it was already too late, and at the turn of the century, they were both reduced to third-party developers for home consoles and computers.

I guess the best way to sum up this dud is by saying, “I give up, orficer!” LOL.

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.