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When I
was a kid, playing video games at home was a good time, but playing
them at an arcade was something altogether different. Don't get me
wrong; the NES will always be special to me, but arcade games were...
different. They were even more special. They had to be, right? I mean,
you had to pay ever time you wanted to play one, so there had to be
something special about them, and one of the most memorable of the old
arcade games, for me at least, was NARC.
Oh, how to describe NARC. NARC was a kind of police simulator-type
game where Officers Max Force and Hit Man set out to clean up the
streets of some generic big city and take down the mastermind behind
all the drugs, gunrunning, murders, etc, Mr. Big. I remember the crime
fighting and arresting in the game, but what I remember most of all
was the violence. You were gunning down hundreds of perps, and for
some reason, they gave you a rocket launcher. Enough said. Suffice to
say, parents were whining about this game before I even realized that
there was such a significant connection between violent games and
violent kids. Though I never picked up on how to shoot dozens of
people in real life, I did learn a few things from the game:
When it
comes to culling the undesirable elements from society, one can never
be too careful. If the opportunity presented itself, you should arrest
these perpetrators, go ahead. Then again, in the time it takes you to
handcuff one perp, you could be wasting a dozen more. To paraphrase
the king from Braveheart, "alive if possible, dead... just as good."
After all, it's easier to get drugs and ammo from a corpse than a
handcuffed suspect, though I'm not sure why.
Wherever
there's a drug peddler, there's bound to be a drug lab within walking
distance. That's just common sense. When you get to said drug lab,
though, there's the matter of what to do with it. It could take weeks,
months to get all those containers and illicit fluids into evidence,
and you've already wasted most of the guilty parties anyway, so what's
the point? The answer: blow the whole thing up. Not from
outside, oh no. That'd be letting your rocket launcher go to waste.
You do it the hard way, from the inside.
The burning corpse of
a drug-peddling hobo: OK.
A dead dog: UNACCEPTABLE!
Whenever
you see a gritty cop drama on TV, the cops are always driving around
in nondescript vehicles of their own. Or police cars. This is a
deliberate falsehood. In actuality, police officers are afforded the
luxury of fine sports cars with built-in machine guns and rocket
launchers. Lots of them, too, in case they wreck the first few cars
driving into dumpsters and landmines.
Contrary
to popular belief, not all Vietnam vets are homeless. Some of them
make quite a lucrative living cultivating marijuana. Also, they
sometimes supplement their income by working as Rambo impersonators.
That alone is why you have to gun them down and swipe their pot. You
might have thought it was to get the ganja bonus, but you thought
wrong.
Clowns
are evil. No surprises there. However, it may surprise you to learn
that the ho is innocent. Indeed, hos are a clown's natural prey. And
you, you're like the farmer trying to keep the gopher from digging up
his vegetables, only in this case "gopher" means "psychotic
knife-wielding clown," and "dig up his vegetables" means "carry a ho
back to his Big Top of horrors". "Farmer", I guess that means "cop
with blue/red outfit with matching motorcycle helmet".
This...
I don't really know what this was about. One minute, you're fighting
squads of Mr. Big's elite guard, then you're blowing a paraplegic Mr.
Big out of his wheelchair, and then suddenly, you're up against the
gigantic and downright terrifying head of Mr. Big. You blast his
sunglasses off, he shoots lasers at you, you shoot back, he turns into
a writhing skull and spine that vomits tongues at you, these things
happen. The important lesson to take away from all of this is to stay
positive no matter what life throws at you.
NARC taught me a lot of things about life, and a lot of things about
being a cop. Most of all, it taught me that being a cop is an
impossible ordeal wherein you'll be chewed by dogs, shot by crackheads,
stabbed by clowns, throttled by PCP thugs, machine gunned by the
disabled, and lasered by the big heads. Law enforcement is definitely
not the right career path for me, no siree. I'll leave that to the
immortals and their endless supplies of quarters. Or William S.
Sessions.
Questions or Comments about this piece?
email Dr. Boogie
*** You too can play NARC! ***
[CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD NARC!]
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