For The Love Of: Future Cop: LAPD

These days, game demos are a dime a dozen.  PC demos can be readily found for download from developers' websites alongside numerous mirror and torrent sites while samples of imminent releases can be sourced and downloaded quickly and easily from both Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network. 

It hasn't always been this way. Before the dawn of the internet and the popularity of online gaming and services, the only way you could sample new games was via the demo discs that accompanied a wide range of games magazines. My brother and I devoured these, playing virtually every game that was featured on them. We sampled Spider, Overboard!, Parappa The Rapper, Ninja: Shadow of Darkness, Tombi, Mr. Domino and a plethora of other titles, but there was one demo that captured our imaginations more than any other.

Set in the not-so-distant future, Future Cop: LAPD sees the soaring crime rate in the City of Angels leading to criminal scum slowly taking over. The city's finest aren't ready to back down just yet, however, releasing their latest superweapon in the fight against crime: the X-1 Alpha, a heavily-armed mech walker also capable of transforming  into a high-speed hovercraft. Stomping around famous locations such as Venice Beach, LAX Airport and Long Beach, it was the player's job to wipe out crime in the most unrelenting way possible.

The basic objective in Future Cop was to destroy everything you could as you progressed through its stages. Sure, the locations changed and the enemies you faced ranged from lunatics to mutants, cultists to malfunctioning supercomputers, but it was up to you to destroy as many enemies and constructions as you can.  You armed your mech before each level , with a whole host of unlockable weapons, including miniguns, flamethrowers, concussion beams, hypervelocity rockets, bounce mines and a whole load of other heavy-duty aramaments, ensuring that things never got boring. The simple and reliable auto-targeting system meant destruction remained reliably satisfying.

The combat wasn't the only thing that kept the player entertained: the superbly-written dialogue made players prick up their ears to listen out for witty exchanges from friend and foe alike. Your dispatcher guided you through the levels, making sure you were never at a loss for what to do next.  She was also partial to the occasional quip, spouting ‘nice shot' in a bad English accent as you shot down yet another craft.  Even the instructional dialogue was brilliantly inconsistent in tone, with your commanding officer showing evident signs of mania while he spouted off the rules for the games free-combat mode.

Then there's the Sky Captain: your malevolent, sentient Artificial Intelligence opponent in said mode. Flying around the level in his armoured jet, he certainly gave you a run for your money, taunting you mercilessly, all the while behaving like a human player would. Destroying him would trigger a furious moan to accompany the crashing and burning of his craft. However this was only a brief reprieve: it wasn't long before you heard the dreaded "I live again!" The believable AI ensured that this mode was as good for a quick blast as the story mode.

The fact that both game modes supported two players added greater longevity and playability to an already great title. Seeing two mech walkers, one blue and one black, storming into crowd control situations (ie. shooting everyone and everything in sight) with perpetually flashing blues and two is always an amusing sight. It appears that law enforcement in the future is hopelessly optimistic:  sending in one or two mechs seems to be their solution to everything.

My brother and I got our hands on the demo and we immediately knew we wanted, no, needed it. We played it over and over again, memorising the layout of the observatory, where enemies lay in waiting and the locations of powerups and weapon upgrades. My brother requested it for his birthday, which that year coincidentally landed on a Friday. He just happened to ‘fall ill' on that day, meaning he got to stay home and have loads of fun while I plodded through a whole day of school before I got a shot. He's only recently owned up to faking it that day, but I've always known to this day that he was fine, wanting to spend the day playing the game by himself.

Browsing through the PlayStation Store the other day, I saw that it was available for download, so I thought I'd give it another bash. It's not perfect (the map can be confusing, level design can be confusing and, like most earlier PSOne games, the d-pad controls are cumbersome and imprecise), but it was a good laugh stomping and floating around a futuristic LA all over again, as well as seeing the often humorous cut-scenes that accompanied the end of a mission.

It's a shame that the title didn't sell as well as it should have as the premise is still extremely original, even 11 years  after its release. The property would have been perfect for a movie adaptation, the mixture of action and humour ensuring that there would never have been a boring moment during its runtime, and a sequel would have been awesome. Hell, even a remake would be an essential purchase.

Who knows, maybe another Future Cop: LAPD demo will appear on Xbox Live and PlayStation network someday in the future. One can hope...