"The game that hooks you with its first level before taking all your quarters with the rest."

In NARC, your task is to run through five different levels of drug-runners, each selling a different brand of dope, until you get to HQ Posse. For each level you start out on the city streets, scroll right, and eventually blast your way into a building, where you find a safe card once you've killed enough bad guys. Once back outside, you can use the slot where you put the card, and you're given an end-of-level bonus for crack bags and dollar bundles picked up as well as busts made. Along the way you will surely get shot or mangled by drug dealers or users. A health bar indicates how much you can take--three lives and you're out, and there's also a continue feature. Special features include cut-scenes when the level starts indicating your task with accompanying walkie-talkie noises and a Defender-like zone above the playing screen that tracks major enemies and how far along you are in the level. Technically the game is impressive, but its main fault is that the later levels get less complex while baddies get impossibly harder, and you'll spend increasingly more time watching your player recover from getting knocked down. Not even explosions and gore make up for this.

Controls, like the quarter-overhead view(shots not at your chest miss, a good thing since there are so many) are sophisticated for the time. In general, you move slightly faster than humans but slower than dogs, forcing different strategies for each. You have a button to crouch, which makes moving slower(the bad guys catch on after a while too, although there's no other way to shoot attack dogs,) another to jump, a third to fire regular shots(this can cancel out enemy fire,) and a fourth for missiles, which are often frequently double-edged, as you can suffer recoil damage from a missile shot, which often does not work on monsters close-in. Naturally you'll wind up confusing several of them at first in critical situations, although most of the time you'll just be shooting a lot. So only the serious player will be bugged by the controls. More annoyingly, at several times you can get stuck on your current quarter because you don't have missiles necessary to zap certain opponents, but each resurrection gets you five new missiles. The game also throws a meager charity your way when, after you've lost all your health, you flash around invincibly for a while before collapsing. It's a great chance for daredevil tactics. You can also play with two players, which will allow for many more busts, as one player can provide cover for the other, although they may wind up fighting over who gets control of the car that can be driven on a later stage.

So here's a brief level summary for those who don't want to spend the time and money to see it all. The first level is a blast. It's in a junkyard setting, where you must apparently shoot down some fellows called the ''Das Lof Gang'' and bust up their pipeline. You'll be shooting and busting a bunch of stereotypical dealers in trenchcoats. There's a lot of opportunity for busts. For the building side-scene you eventually must enter a Chicago ''L'' station which changes midway through--it starts off at red-line Addison(3600N/1000W) beneath Wrigley Field(not a seedy area; I've been there. At any rate it is NOT underground) and heads off a non-existent California(2800W--over two miles west) stop--all the while, there's an L car in the background! Here you should learn the basics of being a good NARC cop; if you're going for points, you want to bust as many folks as you can, but that leaves you open to getting shot.

The second level, Krak Street, introduces some new enemies, who start to make the game tedious. There's a chemist, Spike Rush, who's making injectable drugs in his underground labs. His clones duck and fire syringes which freeze and drain you; if one gets you there may be a domino effect, which is annoying way to lose a man. The dogs, who make offscreen noises as they approach, also appear in this level and even with crouching it is tough to kill them. The helicopter, which I always enjoy nailing with a missile, also appears. Of course, the foot soldiers are still here, and they are a welcome relief. The underground lab is the best part; you have huge beakers of various shapes that contain various colored liquids, and blowing the top off them makes up for the Spike monsters.

The third is a bit of a disappointment; you're introduced to Joe Rockhed the PCP addict, who throws dumpsters at you. You have the ability to drive a car with laser headlights if you can jump in(several are positioned on the way,) although hitting something may eject you. While being able to run over drug dealers is fun, it makes the level too simple, while walking around and shooting them, the alternative, has too many breaks. Again, there are some good ideas, but they aren't combined successfully, and being on a bridge with a blue-sea and sky background is a drop-off from the previous levels. I've got nothing against nature, mind, but such extended quiet scenery doesn't fit the game.

The fourth is the Sunset Strip, where you are asked to protect prostitutes(touching them gets you points too) from Kinky Pinky, a drug addict, although you get more points for blowing him up when he's carrying one away. You even have to avoid dynamite-chucking whackos. At the end there are four small subterranean places, each with a specific monster to face(Pinky, Rockhed, annoying beetles you must rid by jumping, and those dumb dogs,) and you find the safe card in the last one.

The last and least of these scenes is Sergeant Skyhigh's--work your way through NORML paraphernalia and enemies with repeating guns. The level is very brief and inside you can pick up ganja plants which may, however, be mined(if you don't touch them, you can't see where you're going.) The background, a bunch of windows(it's a greenhouse) further adds to the desultory feel. What's worse, you don't even get a cool glowing point total for shooting special bad guys as you do in previous levels.

After that you go downtown to Mr. Big's where a pink car, more pesky than the helicopter, creates more trouble. You also start to see more henchmen with fedoras. A line of them ducks and fires and runs in perfect harmony, and they are really nasty. Inside there are several very short levels--you use safecards you've already got to pass--and after facing three small Mr. Bigs in machine-gunning wheelchairs, you go to the final confrontation, which I must say is disappointingly surreal(I mean, physically impossible, as opposed to one guy taking out a whole bunch of others in a city so engulfed by crime there aren't even grocery stores) and also requires you to win on one quarter. The denouement afterwards is a bit much to sit through even with a remix of the game's major sounds.

So the level design deteriorates as you advance, and often you'll wind up just losing a guy a few seconds after he's appeared. But that's not where Narc's magic lies. The special effects are tremendous. There's a rocking background where a quick. funky drum-beat almost drowns out the tune. Enemies yell stuff, and so do you. ''Freeze! You're Busted!'' ''I give up!'' ''Don't Shoot!'' ''We got it'' when you get a safe-key. The digitized sounds at the level's start are a winner, and the sounds of enemies off-screen are not just useful. There are also clangings, death-grunts and explosions aplenty, with nothing except level's end interrupting the background beat. Driving the car is particularly nice as you have different sounds depending on how hard you hit something, and your tires will screech as you back over foot-soldiers. I'm not a big fan of club or dance music, but I enjoyed the soundtrack, which seems inspired by it. It's got consistent slight variations on the baseline that result from enemies that appear and die, so it never feels repetitive.

Graphics are also impressive. Before progressive JPEGs you had NARC's stage intros, where your main adversary appeared in increasing focus. It just looked high-tech back then, especially with the keyboard beneath the view, and it got you in the mood to shoot the ugly drug peddling jerk that has just appeared. In the background, third stage aside, you'll see a lot of funny, dilapidated buildings: ''1 billion killed'' Krak Huts in level two, varied porn shacks in level four. Perhaps they go overboard with camouflage dumpsters(except when Joe Rockhed throws them,) trash cans and large ashtrays, but the psychedelic vats in the second level and the thugs that come out of the deluxe L car are quite good. Baddies are also animated realistically; Spike ducks and flips maddeningly, with his syringes spinning in the air. Dancing enemies in the latter stages make up for their insane impossibilities by seemingly working it to the game's beat. You even get in on the act, sauntering like a pimp(fortunately for you, no war declared against them yet!) and, when you crouch, bringing up memories of Chuck Berry's duck-walk. And there's nothing like taking out a helicopter or watching crack bags and money and charred limbs fly up in the air and sink through the ground after a successful missile strike. You will also get a kick out of busting dealers; some seem to be failed flashers, and many have nothing on them and walk away, but seeing ''BUST'' stamped on them before they float away increases my macho quotient. Not as much as car wrecks, though. Tires bounce all over the place, and the object you hit flies up almost as high as you do if you drive too fast. Making single enemies fly in the air or slowly nudging a dumpster out of your path is a safer long-term bet, although I recommend all reckless driving actions highly. The most annoying general thing about the graphics is that you'll need trial and error to figure when you'll get hit, especially with syringes and machine guns, but you had to expect that when you signed up for the job, rookie.

Smash TV, the fellow quarter-gobbler game this most closely resembles, seems superior. Not that NARC, which enjoys a slight graphic and sound edge, isn't creative. It's just that Smash TV could afford to be overdone, and NARC messes up at times. Smash TV also allows you more leeway(invincible a few seconds after death) than NARC and allows persistent players to win as any good beat-em-up should, and with its different rooms Smash TV is also more replayable once you've won. NARC's best bet is for technical refinement; try to see how many bad guys you can bust. It's a bit unfair to say ''Narc, you coulda been brilliant like Smash TV if you hadn't gotten involved in drugs,'' as overall it is exciting enough that you will largely ignore its moralistic tone. However, the game is a bit unrefined. Overall, though, you sense that this game had to be made, and it's distinctive enough that it deserves to be remembered. It's hard not to enjoy the plethora of pyrotechnics and gore that make dropping five-oh dimes--err, make that five bucks in QUARTERS--after your own little war on drugs more worthwhile than many government expenditures on theirs.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 09/15/00, Updated 12/11/01