Who you callin' chicken?
Ever played EA’s Future Cop: L.A.PD.? Props if you did. A rundown if you didn’t: you’re an expensive pilot in the Los Angeles of 2098. Crime is legion, and you shift between two forms – mech and hovercar – to saunter deep into gang territory, dishing out instantaneous death sentences as you go. The backdrop had some serious swagger too, courtesy of the cutscenes. Somehow this third-person shooter failed to sell.
It had a sweet multiplayer component too. In a local two-player game, “transformer cops” could duke it out in urban landscapes. But there was a twist. More important than delivering your own firepower was the waging of a certain economy. You would claim outposts, score points, and with them send assembly line tanks and choppers from your stronghold to the enemy’s. It was to this drone army that you would add your own human battlefield-bravado.
"If you've really gotta motor"
The game’s done and dusted, though. Sure it’s available on the PSN, but that’s kind of like shining the shoes of a guy you just shot. If the original had sold, yes, maybe then we’d have seen a sequel.
by Dave Rapoza
Until those shoes are shiny enough, I think it’s Super Meat Boy, a game that surely you do know and love, that could draw inspiration from Future Cop’s multiplayer (Future Cop wasn’t a bona fide platformer, but sometimes it felt like you were doing this). Meat Boy and the rest of the crew would bore us jumping on each other to score kills. What they can do is gather resources and keys (dangerously placed when more rewarding) to fund the littering of the enemy camp with buzz saws and minions. And with all this peril amassing, it’s last meat-wad standing wins. Threat-placement could be done with the right analog stick in the console iteration, or maybe the preserve of a Meat God. The more I think about it, the more this seems like a fit for the Wii U, what with the separate screen and all…
Or hey, ever played the Swedish Armed Forces team test?
Imagine a relay race among boxed off Meat Boys, where the success of one increases the resources of the next, or where three players collectively build a bridge to victory for the fourth.
It’s certainly a daydream, especially considering that Team Meat are working on another project, and that they’ve dismissed the idea of a sequel. But perhaps to other fanatics, the above makes mouth-watering sense.
