Super Cop

When a new arcade-style beat-em-up about a cop in uniform hit the arcades in the nineties, you knew the next forty minutes would be spent hammering faceless goons and cursing at unpredictable enemies. Super Cop is exactly that kind of wild: a relentless brawler with no mercy, no safety net, no map.

You play as a cop with a straightforward work order: find the crooks and get them into the slammer. The scenery shifts from streets through bars to some dark warehouse where you definitely shouldn't be. Each level is a sequence of fights you simply have to survive. Don't expect polished combos, stylish acrobatic action, or deep storytelling — this is about spamming attacks, dashing across the screen, and hoping you notice the incoming hits in time.

The controls are straightforward: direction stick, attack button, jump. The problem annoyingly lies in how the enemies behave — they always seem to outwit you, even though they're not showing any real cunning. Their AI is dumb but aggressive, so by about the third round something starts to bite. With no effective way to move backwards, no special moves — just existing, yelling, and mashing the attack button until they fall. The graphics are rough and harsh, the music loops and burrows into your head long after you've shut down the computer.

For its time it was solid arcade fare, but over the years it proves more frustrating than fun. There's no momentum, no sense of progress — just compulsive repetition of the same pattern, like you're fighting a vaccination. Games like this operated on a simple principle in the nineties: the more you play, the sharper you get, but without variation it quickly dulls.

These days you'll play it more out of nostalgia and curiosity than for actual enjoyment. In archives of old games you'll now want to play it in a browser — at least you can quit whenever it bores you. And it will bore you fast.