When you think of arcade shooters, your first thought is probably zombie games like House of the Dead. Well before House of the Dead was created, there was an arcade game that involved cops and an E.V.L. Corporation.
If you owned a Sega Saturn, I know for a fact that you had this game. Why you might ask, because it came with the console here in the States along with that “bootleg” disc. The game had 3 different levels; Easy, Medium, and Hard; Easy being the Arms Black Market, Medium Weapon Storage, Hard being the E.V.L. Headquarters.
This game had classic arcade shooter written all over it. It was laid out just like it would be played in an actual arcade, only instead you would use the Saturn controller. You could also use a gun attachment they made for it to give it that authentic feels, but it was really hard to come across. One thing you will notice if you have never played the game before, it that there are lots of guys who just randomly pop out of corners and hiding behind objects. On top of that, they are all wearing the exact same outfit, at least on the first level. They have hostages that will pop out in white outfits yelling “Don’t shoot me”. If you shoot them you lose one life and if you ended up picking up some kind of special weapon like the shotgun or machine gun, you would lose that too. The boss battles are pretty entertaining and can be a bit of a challenge. At the Weapon Storage, you have a crazy military guy who has a gun that can shoot 3 fireballs at the same time. On top of that, he will randomly leave the screen and you would have more guys popping around trying to kill you as well. If that isn’t a pain in the ass, try fighting Joe Fang, the final boss. He uses a helicopter with a huge assortment of weapons, and there’s even another boss right before him that strongly resembles the Kingpin from Spider-Man who hides in a missile robot thing.
This game was influential to many present shooting games. This game was the first to use 3D Polygons in a shooting game. Many rail shooters like House of the Dead and Time Crisis were based off this game. Virtua Cop even influences one of the most notorious shooters of all time Goldeneye 007. They ended up making 3 games in the series, and oddly enough Virtua Cop 3 for the Arcade came out 8 years after Virtua Cop 2 came out. Sega and AM2( you remember the guys with the palm tree in their logo right?) did such a great job and I would definitely play this game at least once in your lifetime, but sadly, this game has been long forgotten by many and has ended up here in the Gaming Graveyard.
