NARC

"NARC = Now Another Rotten Cartridge"

I think whoever produced this game had a lot of experience with drugs. Narc in the arcade was ridiculously hard, not to mention insanely violent, and this translation manages to crank the difficulty level up while reducing the cool visuals, thus eliminating most of the fun from a game that was already somewhat lacking to begin with. Here’s my take on it:

Story 2/10

This game depicts the war on drugs, or at least it claims to. Actually, it looks more like World War II at the height of brutality. Limbs and wads of cash and dope go flying through the air as Max Force police officers launch rockets down the throats of drug addicts who look like anything from filthy trench coat wearing bums to perverted clowns to Rambo (I’ll bet Sylvester Stallone doesn’t appreciate the insinuation that Rambo was a dope addict who grew his own drugs in a hippie neighborhood). You can arrest some types of perps for extra points, which you’ll probably need to do a lot of since otherwise you won’t get any extra lives, without which you won’t finish this game. On second thought, who cares? The ending is stupid anyway, but we’ll get to that. The so-called “War on Drugs” should have been referred to as the “Hundred Years War”, because this game feels like it takes a hundred years to play through to the end. And every moment is pure tedium.

Gameplay 3/10

Don’t make me laugh. Your character walks slowly down the street, packing his rocket launcher and machine gun, trading bullets with a million different addicts at once. Your health will run out like crap through a goose as you get sprayed by bullet after bullet with seeming nowhere to run. You start the game with like three lives, and it’s entirely possible to lose them all at the very first stage. This isn’t too uncommon since the controls completely suck. It works like this. To fire your machine gun (which has limited rounds before it fires a crappy single shot) you press and hold the “B” button. Now to fire one of your very limited rockets, you have to TAP the “B” button. This is lots of fun when you’re trying to fire quick spurts of bullets at a thug to conserve ammo and…”Ooops! I just fired one of my precious rockets at a junkie!” or when you’re trying to take on a helicopter but can’t manage to fire anything but your machine gun, which is useless in this case, or worse yet, can’t even jump right. The controls work the same way for the jump button: Hold it to crouch, and tap it to jump. Easy, right? No. Stupid. You will be forced to contend with these putrid controls from level to level as the challenge increases dramatically in just a couple short levels. All the while, your desire to play this mess will be plummeting fast. I mentioned the corny enemies before – junkies, psycho pervert clowns, thugs who can throw dumpsters (in the arcade anyway) Rambos, and dynamite throwing pimps (yes, that’s right…what pimp doesn’t carry a spare stick or two to subtly deal with those pesky, nosy cops?) The most outrageously ridiculous part about this game is the end, which I have no qualms about ruining for you even if you haven’t seen it. You take on the drug lord, “Mr. Big”, who starts out as a cripple in a wheel chair that shoots rapid-fire machine gun bursts from the front (let’s pray that’s never made standard, or working at nursing homes will be a real nightmare!). Once you’ve blown him to kingdom come, he crawls off into his inner sanctum, where he becomes…OH, NO! A HUGE HEAD! Not just any huge head, but one that spits tongues, and eyes and noses, and…wait…are we on drugs here? This isn’t natural? How did a game about the war on drugs and busting junkies and clowns become about a huge head wearing sunglasses and a hat killing cops with flying tongues? Ah, screw it. By this point, you’ll just want out of this misery anyway, and won’t take the time to think about it. You’ll feel like you’ve been drugged after about an hour of this misery, as you begin drooling and losing motor control. This game sucks. I don’t know why I’ve given the gameplay a 3, except it makes me laugh to watch clowns and dogs and bits of hobos go flying through the air with reckless abandon when the missiles start flying. I think I need to spend less time indoors.

Graphics 3/10

Hmmm. I suppose these aren’t too bad for NES, but compared to the arcade, they’re quite crappy. They’ve totally taken the appealing visuals out of blowing perps to smithereens with a rocket and the backgrounds are boring building and fence scenery that you’ll see again and again and again…at least they’re colorful, but when that is the only good you can find to say about the way a game looks, you might as well be saying, “this game is crap, but it’s colorful crap!” You won’t want to play this game for the way it looks. If you must play it, stick to the arcade. Either way is a waste of money.

Sound 2/10

*Yawn* Sounds? Oh, yeah, right…you mean those annoying little “pit-pit-pit” noises when you fire your gun, and that sound like someone getting ready to hock a loogey when you blow something up? Well, if you want to call it sound, go right ahead. I call it crap. The same is to be said for the stuff they call music in this game. It is diarrhea for the ears, a never-ending flow of repetitive, hypnotic noise that we could just as well have suffered through this debauchery without. Turn the sound off and put on a nice cd or something…even Vanilla Ice would be better than the sounds of this game.

Writing this review has given me a headache, because it has caused me to delve deep into my subconscious and relive the boredom I originally fought so hard to escape in this game. This game blows chunks so badly, you won’t even want to revisit it ten years after the first time you play it for nostalgia’s sake. I ditched this crappy game after the 100th time of getting killed at the very end, and I’ve never looked back. The opening screen to this game says, “Winners don’t use drugs.” Are they trying to say if you can’t win this garbage that you’re a junkie yourself? Well, I don’t care what they call me, because I’m never revisiting this piece of crap again, winner or otherwise. This game itself is the biggest loser of all.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 05/28/03, Updated 05/28/03