Judge Dredd (Arcade)

Developer:

Midway

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Release Date:

Never

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Systems:

Arcade

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing an arcade game that never made it to arcades. They came really close though, had four prototype cabinets built and everything. Unfortunately the responses from people who played it weren't great and the game was scrapped instead of reworked because the developers didn't have much faith in it either.

I bet the guy who made that Judge Dredd head was happy with his work though, as it's impressing the hell out of me. First I assumed it must have been a sculpture, as you can imagine what a 3D rendered Dredd face would've looked like in 1992, but it's apparently an actor wearing prosthetics. You can see a better photo of the makeup (and the other side of his face) on the artist's DeviantArt page if you're curious.

I thought about playing this one ages ago when I was trying out all those other Judge Dredd games, like Judge Dredd, Judge Dredd and Judge Dredd, but I wasn't really keen on writing about an unfinished prototype back then so I skipped over it. I figured I had enough on my plate trying to play every video game that exists without also worrying about the ones that don't. But the game didn't go away, it got into the back of my mind and made itself comfortable, so here I am doing my past self's job for him to finally cross it off the list.

Sorry the screenshots aren't very sharp this time, they were too tiny at the original resolution and too big doubled. Not that they're supposed to be sharp, you're supposed to be viewing them on a fuzzy CRT. In fact this is the most authentic my site's ever looked!

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I left the title screen on for a bit and the game brought me over to this control room so it could run through the basics of Judge Dredd's premise. Actually first it told me GAME OVER, but then it brought me me up to speed on the basics... at high speed. It's really flicking through these screens of text, while the digitised judge on her 3D chair constantly fidgets and fiddles with everything. 

In the year 2134, 400 million people call Mega-City One home. It's a vast city running the whole length of the Eastern seaboard of nuclear devastated America and it's got all kinds of crime going on. So much crime that the authorities decided that the only sensible way to deal with it was to take 5 year olds, give them 15 years of police training and stylish metal armour to protect their shoulders, and then send them out into the streets. They are the Judges and Judge Dredd's the best of them.

Alright, my first job is to get into a nuclear shopping mall via the sewers and stop the Angel gang. Hey I remember them from the 1995 Sylvester Stallone movie! This game predates the film by a bit though, so it's purely based on the comic book. In fact it seems very based on it so far; they haven't tried to reimagine it. Though it likely would've gotten a makeover to look more like the movie if any of their plans to resurrect the game had panned out.

If you're wondering what kind of advanced workstation Midway used to produce these 3D visuals back in 1992, it was apparently the Amiga they had in the back room. Well they did the Willis Power Tower animations on it anyway, before presumably moving up to a PC for the rest of the 3D. I don't know if that means that wireframe image was done on the Amiga, or something I'm going to see later, but either way it's a nice little wireframe. They should've totally used the Escape from New York method through, and painted a physical model with lines, seeing as they loved digitizing things so much back then.

STAGE 1

See, that background has to be a digitized model! Some of it anyway.

Screens like this might not be much to look at, but they're great because they save me from explaining the controls. That button layout doesn't seem all that comfortable though, plus it seems that they've forgotten to give me a special move button.

Here, have some digitized actors to go with the backgrounds. You can really tell this game was being made around the same time as Mortal Kombat II. In fact Dredd was played by the guy who played Nightwolf, Cyrax, Sektor and Smoke in the Mortal Kombat 3 games and he would've fit right in with them if it wasn't for the slight size mismatch.

I love how accurate that Judge Dredd outfit is. Goofy, but accurate. At this resolution the only thing stopping it from being perfect is the way his badge and the bird on his shoulder flip sides depending on the attack I'm using. I also like the guy's hilarious stompy walk.

But this isn't a one on one fighting game, it's one of those side scrolling beat 'em ups. In fact I could bring two other players into the action alongside me, but I won't. There's barely enough room in this street for me; it's very narrow for a scrolling brawler. Though now it's got me wondering who the other Judges would be. Did they record three different actors or did they just palette swap Judge Dredd? Damn, I'm going to bring them in after all to find out.

They just palette swapped Judge Dredd!

Hang on, is that woman in the background walking a tiny Goro from Mortal Kombat? Hang on, is every woman walking a tiny Goro?

I'm surprised to see pedestrians out for a walk in a game like this, but maybe more surprised that it's a good time for it. Uh, I mean that it's broad daylight, obviously it's not a good time to walk down this particular street. I assumed that they were just part of the scenery at first, seeing how completely oblivious they are to everything around them, but enemies do walk over and hassle them.

Then I can rescue them for a 'citizen saved bonus'.

This is a different part of the street by the way, honest. It's easy to get Music Clown mixed up with Mr Clone, but they're definitely different shops. The main difference is that I think Mr Clone is where all these identical goons are coming from. I'm just hoping a clown didn't get cloned as well, though it would at least add some variety to the enemy types... if you could even tell the difference.

By the way Green Dredd is doing something really unusual here, as he's punching an enemy diagonally to knock him further into the background. In fact I can attack in any direction, even kick them directly towards the screen.

Anyway I'm putting Yellow and Blue Dredd away now. Judge Dredd kicks enemies in the street alone, at least when I'm playing him.

Huh, I'm at the end of the street already? It's almost, but not quite, three screens across. I like the decorations though; I guess TNT never goes out of fashion.

Hang on, that's a Romulan Warbird from Star Trek: The Next Generation up there! The series was still airing at this point, how did they think no one would notice?

I mean it's a pretty iconic design and they showed up in the series a fair bit.

The game's a prototype that was at least a month away from being completed so it's hard to know which parts of the mismatched backgrounds are temporary placeholder art and which are just cutting edge for 1992, but I'd be very surprised if I saw that in a finished game.

Anyway Dredd has a bit of a chat with the man in the hole and then leaps into the sewers after him.

Oh no, it's rats!

I wish I could mention something insightful about the combat but I'm still less than a minute into the game and I haven't moved past button mashing yet, so I got nothing. Rats keep jumping at me and they ate one of my lives, that's all I know.

Though I do have some rat trivia for you! The developers actually got a rat from a pet shop and filmed it to make these sprites. One of the artists adopted it afterwards, but it eventually escaped to live out its fantasy of being an actual sewer dwelling rodent.

Crap, it's the guy in the hat again and this time he wants to invite me to a boss fight.

I like how the floor here as a nice line scrolling parallax effect on it. I'm less keen on the way Fink's trying to paint it with my blood and I'm doing a rubbish job of stopping him.

I've been pressing buttons and pulling in directions trying to find all the moves, but it seems that the controls screen wasn't lying when it said 'punch, kick'. A lot of these games let you tap the button to break into a short flurry of attacks that stagger then enemy and then kick him across the screen, but I can't do that either. I can't even find a way to make Dredd draw that pistol he's clearly wearing in his ankle holster!

Man he takes off a lot of health with each hit. He also likes to roll across the ground and throw stuff at me. But I'm armed with infinite flying kicks, so I'm going to spam them at him once I've pressed start and gotten off the ground.

I haven't got a lot of skill, but when you always respawn at the same place you fell persistence is a suitable substitute and I eventually wore him down. It wasn't exactly a Mortal Kombat fight, but he sure sprayed a lot of blood around when I finally won.

But the level's not over yet, as Dredd walks into the lift in the background and carries on up the tower.

You can get a better look at the perspective effect on the floor up here. Also I've found a floating Judge helmet, complete with severed head!

If I've learned anything from video games, it's that tiny versions of your own head are amongst the most desirable items to own. But walking into it and pressing punch wasn't enough to collect it, and it shrunk away to nothing as I was stumbling around. So that sucks, especially as I lost my last life immediately afterwards and had to use a second credit.

Oh, I was probably supposed to use the crouch button wasn't I? I haven't tried that yet.

Crouching also lets me pick up and throw people!

This really isn't a very good game, it's clear they hadn't finished refining the combat, but I can't complain about being able to throw digitized people into other digitized people who are really asking for it. It seems like a reasonable revenge for all the clubs or whatever they've been lobbing at me.

Still, I prefer them throwing stuff at me to when they walk over and uppercut me off the building. I mean it's a nice feature, but only when I'm the one doing it.

Hey they really were cloning all these goons, clothes and all. Though they got the colour wrong, as the original is clearly wearing blue trousers.

They were all cloned with weapons to throw at me as well, so I'm crouching here to let them all their projectiles harmlessly pass over my head, until they get bored throwing things and walk over into my uppercut.

Well I've got Blue Pants out of the machine at least.

I tried going into the machine myself to get my own palette swapped duplicate and for a moment it seemed like it worked, but then another goon came out instead. Seems that there's no way to get another Dredd clone without inserting a coin and pressing 'Start'.

Anyway I'm going to get back to hitting people as that guy's fake face and gut is really starting to bother me.

I've found another boss fight! This time it's against the guy with a dial on his head that adjusts his temperament. Unfortunately there's no setting that stops him charging at me.

I wish I could say I've been darting out of the way at the last moment each time, but I've mostly just been tapping the punch button. All punches all the time in all directions (as long as they're the one he's currently in). He's got a lot of health though so I can see this taking a while.

Oh no, he turned the dial on his head and said he's going "vicious"!

Why not just start with the dial turned to full though? Oh I see, I have to knock his health down to reach the next setting.

One thing I've learned about games is that if you're in doubt, flying kicks often help. Not always, but often.

I've also noticed that someone keeps yelling "Judge Dredd!" whenever Dredd respawns from the sky. And he's been doing that a lot this battle, as Mean Machine has been headbutting me, throwing me, and pirouetting with his metal arm out. It's all been very vicious, surly and brutal. And mean.

Still, I stuck with it and got him to spray all his blood out in the end.

I did it, I finally reached the end of level one! It seemed to take forever, though it was probably closer to five minutes.

Now I have to do shooting practice though, which is strange. Why practice a skill you'll never use?

This level doesn't look very finished either, as the screen's filling up with floating targets. Twice as many as you can see in this screenshot as they flicker on and off to appear transparent. It looks a bit glitchy but they're holograms so maybe it's supposed to.

All I have to do is move the crosshair over them and shoot, it's pretty straightforward. Funny how much quicker it is to take down bosses when you use a gun instead of your fists, he should maybe try that some time.

I probably shouldn't be arguing for a cop to be more trigger happy, the world don't need any more of that, but he's Judge Dredd! His raison d'être is to be a fascist pig in a grim dark future where Dirty Harry would be considered too soft. I think it would be okay if he used his gun a bit in this game.

Right, the next boss I need to take down is... Precious Leglock? Is honestly that a real character from the comic?

Wow, okay turns out that it is. Seems I need to read more 2000AD.

I never did finish that stack of 50 issues I was given back when I wrote about those other Judge Dredd games. It's a good comic, I just get distracted easily and forget what it was I was doing.

Oh right, I'm writing about a video game.

STAGE 2

Damn, Dredd's actually doing some shooting on this level! Well, he was anyway, before he was rudely interrupted.

The shooting range level gave me the impression that putting bullets into enemies would kill them right away, but that turned out to be Judge propaganda, as I'm struggling to get enough bullets into these robots to destroy them before I get shot myself. Especially with orbs continually flying around and shooting me as well. And the turrets hanging off the floor above.

I've still got two attack buttons, but now one first the gun forwards, and one fires it diagonally upwards. There's no good reason they could've had let me pull up to tilt my aim upwards as it's basically a run and gun platformer at this point, but I guess that would make it too easy to hit those bloody orbs.

Not that I care about how how hard it is at this point, as I'm too tired and bored to make much of an effort anymore. I must have lost like 12 continues at this point, whatever.

Nope, couldn't shoot him quick enough either. At least I managed to land on a platform this time without sending Dredd plummeting to his death a few times first. He's not very agile.

This is the first Midway game to feature 3D sprites, so if the robots look a bit primitive, that's why. The game was in development two years before Killer Instinct and Donkey Kong Country came out, and they were rendering them on Amigas and PCs instead of Silicon Graphics workstations. I'm pretty sure that background is actually a photographed model though. Wait... is that a TIE Fighter?

Wow it bloody is, it's the underside of Darth Vader's TIE Fighter from the first Star Wars! They've used it for the base of the girders as well. There's nothing wrong with a bit of kitbashing and if I complained about them photographing toys for their backgrounds and sprites I'd have to criticise Doom as well, but I'm surprised by how obvious it is. Well, to anyone who had a TIE Fighter toy as a kid anyway.

After a bit more shooting and jumping Dredd put the gun away to take on Precious Leglock in the robot wrestling ring. You might think it's a bad idea for a human to fight a machine hand to hand, and yeah I'm definitely starting to get that impression too.

He likes to say "I'll crush you like toys," in a stuttery robot voice, and then charge into me. Or just stomp the floor, either way I'm sent flying back into the electric ropes.

This is so weird: it's a live action digitised actor fighting a stop motion action figure in front of an audience of 3D rendered robots, in a ring of hand-pixelled electric rods. There's a bit of a mismatch of styles.

That's a nice touch. The other bosses sprayed out blood when they finally went down, but Leglock sprays out bolts.

With stage 2 completed I got sent back home for more holographic shooting practice. The developers originally had another minigame here: a top down bike chase where you had to jump gaps, but they removed it because it was too easy. I can't imagine it being much easier than the target practice though.

I figured I'd be back to punching people again, but nope the next stage is also all about shooting.

There's a bit of a block war going on between two skyscrapers and they're going to be ready to blast each other with cannons soon. We can stop them with riot foam, but it'll take 3 minutes and 30 seconds to get here and by then it'll be too late. So I have to get between the two blocks and fight waves of block warriors to slow them down and delay them long enough for the foam to arrive.

Sounds like a pain in the ass to be honest. I hate timers.

STAGE 3

I like armour-piercing rounds though. There's all kinds of ammo pick ups available for me, like ricochet, incendiary and heat seeking, and they seem to be showing up a lot more often than they did on the last stage. Shame nothing seems to kill those guys with the heavy weapons in the background.

Blocks in Judge Dredd are often named after celebrities and fictional characters, so I was wondering whether Simpson Tower was named after O.J. Simpson or maybe Bart. But now I'm thinking it's probably named after one of the two programmer, Jake Simpson, with the other tower named after artist Tim Coman. Just a hunch I have, based on the fact they have 'JAKE' and 'TIM' written on the sides of them.

Crap, I was way too slow. I didn't kill enough people in time so the cannon fired with over a minute left to go before the riot foam got here! Don't ask me why killing people in the street affects what's going on in the tower, maybe the guy setting up the cannon is just getting depressed because all his friends are dying.

I'm getting a bit depressed myself, as this is arcade difficulty I can't bypass with bribery. Feeding cash into the machine just keeps the nightmare repeating, so I can't leave here until I get it right.

Not much point me taking more screenshots of it either, as I'm stuck on one tiny stretch of road (see the stitched together image above) fighting the same enemies, wave after wave. For 3 and a half long minutes. Well 3 minutes 10 seconds actually, as the briefing was lying about the time, but it still feels long.

SEVEN MINUTES LATER

Just four seconds left this time. I could actually win this! Still plenty of time for me to lose though. I had seven seconds on the clock last time the canon fired. The trouble I'm having is that I keep on getting Dredd killed, and time spent lying dead on the ground and respawning in the sky is time I can't use to shoot waves of enemies.

Though I've read that the level actually gets easier each time you play it, due to the ETA timer running down faster. I'm not going to test that though, as if the game's basically letting me win then I don't want to know about it.

Yes! I beat it on my third try! I'm so good at games! The block war is finally over.

But the the game's not over yet, as I still have to complete another shooting practice stage, this time with civilian targets I need to avoid shooting. It's not really a huge challenge to hit the right targets though as the cursor moves just a little too slow for me to make snap choices without thinking.

ONE SHOOTING STAGE LATER

Okay, now the game is over.

The developers were working on a final stage where you'd have to fight Judge Death and his conveyor belt of reanimated corpses, and then you'd have to re-kill all the bosses all over again. Or maybe the boss rush would've come first... or maybe they would've just dropped the idea in the end. Either way, all I got in this prototype was a picture of the Judge Death mannequin they'd made, then I got to shoot my name into the high score table and it was done.


CONCLUSION

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It took me ages to finally get around to playing this, and I'm not just talking about the years that have passed since I wrote about those other Dredd games. I mean every time I was ready to try the game something else jumped out of nowhere to demand my attention. It was like I was facing a vast conspiracy with only one aim: to stop me from playing an unreleased Judge Dredd arcade game. So by the time I'd gotten all that out of the way I was really eager to actually start pressing buttons already. It soon cured me of that.

I know I'm not the most qualified person to judge whether a scrolling beat 'em up is objectively bad, but man this is pretty bad. It's like they took Final Fight and dumbed it down. I'm not even sure why it has separate punch and kick buttons as it doesn't seem to matter what you press, as long as you keep pressing it to fight off the tide of identical clones and rats swarming at you. Though I'm sure someone with more practice and better reflexes could probably mash that button more effectively than I did, as I got Dredd killed so many times that I stopped really trying, or even paying attention. The game was too challenging for me to enjoy and too easy for me to fail. You respawn where you drop, so death barely slows you down... as long as you keep feeding those continues into it. You even get to keep your score! The game don't care, it just wants money.

Though it's only a brawler for the first level, before switching to something even more awkward. I was expecting it'd get back to the punching later, but nope aside from the wrestling match you get five minutes of beating up the same person and that's it. It was nice to play a scrolling beat 'em up with some variety for once, but you're stuck with a gameplay style until you're sick of it and then you never do it again. Well, aside from the shooting minigame which shows up three times and never outstays its welcome. Though that's still just another mediocre take on a something some other game had already done much better.

On the plus side there's always something new and weird to see, but I've just ruined that for you by showing off the entire game. Sorry about that. You can tell from the screenshots that the graphics are a strange collage of digitised actors, 3D renders, stop motion mannequins and photos of sci-fi model kits that leaves it looking like they hadn't replaced all the placeholder art yet, and maybe they hadn't! All I know is that it doesn't seem like a game with only a month of development left. Though it does look at lot like the Judge Dredd comic it's based on, just... sunnier. If there's one thing they nailed, it's the satirical style of the source material, and I feel confident in saying that as someone who read half a stack of issues seven years ago.

Would I recommend the game? Maybe in co-op, as everything's better in co-op and I'm sure this is an experience best endured with friends. It's like twenty minutes long if you don't get stuck on the block war so it's not exactly a huge time commitment. But even if it had been finished and released it was never going to be one of Midway's arcade treasures, so adjust your expectations accordingly.

If you want to read more, there's an interview with the developers that I nicked all my trivia from here: Gaming Hell

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I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that you're welcome to leave a comment underneath, and to maybe take a guess at what the next game's going to be, but I wouldn't have anything else to write here if I didn't.