The Cynical Gamer

Episode 4 - The Running Man

Video Transcript:

Back in the 1980's a slew of action films were being dominated by two muscle-bound actors, namely Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Out of the two Schwarzenegger arguably was the best as he had the best roles alloted to him. During this time Stephen King's horror books were also being converted to the big screen and one of those was The Running Man, which was penned under King's writer name Richard Bachman.

The film was about a game show that convicts had to participate in, and they were hunted down by different stalkers for the entertainment of the viewing audience - think of it more like a glorified hanging.

As per usual for films starring the biggies there's always the franchising which means video games and for most of the time the film to game conversions suck as badly as the game to film conversions.

The Running Man was developed by Emerald Software and published by Grandslam Entertainment for many platforms. The game starts off really nicely showing digitised speech and video, which was impressive at the time. In fact, it was so good that many gaming shops used it for display purposes just to showcase the Amiga's ability.

I know what you are thinking, that's a great intro sequence, so the game must have been awesome, right? Ha, I wish it were the case....

The main problem is that there is NOTHING THERE, you just jump a couple of obstacles, run to the end of the level and then fight the stalker with whatever weapons you MAY have found. Sure, the sprites are huge and nicely detailed, the music itself, which may annoy some people with it's repetative nature, can easily be ignorable. But it doesn't distract from the problem that the gameplay, although simple, is just flat. The massively annoying thing about the game are the dogs, which appeared ONCE in the film, who randomly only spawn at the beginning and the end of the level. Trying to take out a stalker is much more difficult when you also have to content with that damn mongrel. Although, it seems that kicking the dog can give you an energy boost. Oh and when you kill a stalker the energy bar will drain, meaning you have a certain amount of time to escape the level, but more often than not, you'll find yourself with not enough energy to escape.

In case that anyone is stuck in the first level on getting past that damn ledge, you have to walk-jump and as soon as you get onto the middle ledge, run-jump to the next one.

I see what they were trying to achieve with the feel of the film, but it just doesn't work!

I'll leave you with a classic Arnie line which just shows what I feel about this game.