Well, that's the final mission done. Time for the Final Assessment (although it's missing from the World version).
I'm mostly sharing this because the names for the City Sweeper clones- seen only in Alpha Renewal- are pretty funny.
Afterwards, you'll get your ending. If you count the different character variations, there's actually eight different endings... One 'bad', seven 'good'.
If you didn't stop Dr. Crayborn from dropping the bomb, then this bad ending is your reward:
The city's been levelled. You're fired.
... But in the Japanese and Alpha Renewal versions, you get a little post-game pep-talk. You can do it next time!
If you did stop Crayborn, however, then you'll get a tiny bit of dialogue from the characters you played as.
This is the ending for all three characters together- all the other possible endings are on this page instead.
Then after that, Crayborn's locked up and we get the end credits!
Now this bit's pretty easy, we already know who most of these people are! They're Nazca staff! Most of the stuff you can see on that page, but to reiterate, the main staffers here who went on to work on Metal Slug as Nazca are Meeher, Akio, Susumu, Kozo and HIYA!, but special mention must go to Fuku Chan (presumably the female Irem office worker who said 'Banpuu' the best to get the role as Rosa- more on that in an interview later) and Drew in the American Staff section who was the main creator of Ninja Baseball Bat Man and who I pestered via email once.
Now, an interesting thing, exclusive to the Japanese version- not even in Alpha Renewal! Beat the game without Rosa present and you'll get the standard credits music, Than Hawk Anger (this is always the credits music in the World version). However, if you beat the game with Rosa present, you get a song you'll otherwise never hear, An-Non TO`KI`ME`KI Street, a very jaunty little number that appears to have actual lyrics that appear, karaoke machine-style, at the bottom of the screen. As far as I'm aware, though, there was never an arranged version that put the lyrics in, like with Hold You Still! from Metal Slug. There was a soundtrack release for Undercover Cops but while there's a few arranged songs, this one isn't among them. So, we've put together the lyrics on this page for your reading pleasure.
... Oh, but wait, sequel hook! As you hear Dr. Crayborn's laughter, you know he'll be up to no good again.
If Undercover Cops had a sequel, that is. Which it didn't. Sigh.
... Enough trivia and nonsense though. It's been a while, but here we go with HIGH SCORE TABLE TIME!!
That's all the bad guys beaten up and sent to jail, then- we've finished Undercover Cops.
I'll fess up, in case it isn't massively obvious already, I have a big, big soft spot for this game. Part of it is due to its development team, many of whom went on to make Metal Slug- one of my favourite games of all time. Another part of it is the fact that it's Irem, a developer I really love even if they're not really with us these days (pachinko sims don;t count). The final part, though, is that it's a ridiculous, over-the-top game bursting with personality and charm, and I love that. Some of it is obvious (like the expressive animation for all the enemies and characters, and the impossibly huge weapons that your Undercover Cop can swing like it ain't no thing), some is less so (the crows that hover around on Mission 1, the teeny-tiny moles that can lunge for your face in Mission 3, and the bonus TV item that has Dobkeratops on it), and then we have to give a special mention to the soundtrack, which is stuffed with cheesy voiceclips like BREAK IT DOWN and C'MON C'MON C'MON and is so upbeat and catchy it's hard not to like it. It does also help, of course, that the game is as solid as they come- perhaps not a rewrite of the scrolling brawler playbook, but one that takes what works and adds a few little foibles of its own (wake-up attacks!) but mostly sticks to doing what it should do very well.
Honestly, the only knocks at the game are the ever-so-slight cheapness of some of the bosses (Moguralian β I am looking at you) and how, while I'm OK with it being a fairly short game (moreso with other games, I don't like scrolling brawlers to overstay their welcome- they have to be paced just so, and made an appropriate length), Mission 5 drops the ball a little. It seems to have been designed with the intent of keeping the player at the controls for perhaps a little too long, repeating huge groups of the same enemy and having you do the exact situation (a T-900 in front of a big hole, sometimes with a Makaku) about four times in the same stage. If only Irem had just tuned up this one stage a little! As it stands, though, this is definitely in the upper-tier the Final Fight-style games from the 90s- I specifically file it away with the 'simple' Final Fight-alikes, not intended as an insult but it's to keep it separate from more complex stuff like Alien Vs. Predator and Battle Circuit. In its own category, though, Undercover Cops is high up there, and you absolutely have to give it a go. Do it for Irem.
Just don't play the World version. Yikes!
And now, it's that time, folks!
EXTENDED PLAY!
First up, a tiny look at an earlier version of the game.
These shots appear on the Japanese flyer for the game and have some small differences from the final. Specifically, the player lifebars have red sections at the very end to denote when their health is critical (so does the boss lifebar), and the boss name appears to the side of the lifebar rather than above it. It's not much, but it's something, right? Additionally, these shots use the World names for the characters and bosses, and is also missing the cooking pot in the Gunpuncher shot, suggesting the World version names were established first, perhaps?
Given that ports of Irem arcade titles were pretty thin on he ground in the 90s, it's actually surprising Undercover Cops made it home at all, let alone to the SNES. Joining the likes of Risky Challenge (SNES/PS1/Saturn), In the Hunt (PS1/Saturn) and Gunforce - Battle Fire Engulfed Terror Island (SNES, mentioned mostly because of that subtitle) as the few Irem titles ported in this period, Undercover Cops was released for the SNES in 1995, three years after the arcade game and was published by Varie. Sadly, it was only released in Japan, although there were plans for a US release as this boxart will verify. Why it didn't make it is a mystery, though I'd bet it was perhaps a little too late for a relatively simple brawler in those days. I dunno.
Anyway, considering how bloody nice the original game looks, this is quite an impressive job- lots of detail has been sacrificed (mostly background extras like the water-spewing pipe in Mission 1, and lots of animation cut especially on the Morugalians) but the overall look is retained startlingly well. Additionally, the music is shockingly faithful- it even keeps the majority of the HOOO BREAK IT DOWN voices, both in-song and character voices (although they're somewhat muffled). In that sense, this is as faithful a port as you could expect from the SNES. I'm kind-of amazed they got it running like this at all!
There are some other changes, of course. To start with stuff that's been taken out, there are no longer any girders (they've all been replaced with poles), weapons like the jeep in Mission 1 and steel pipe bundles in Mission 2 are gone, and there's no two or three-player support. That last one is a shame (it's what killed the Final Fight port) but I can see why they decided to leave it out- even with just one player, the game will slow down when there's 3 or 4 enemies on-screen, so it's easy to see that throwing in a second player would make this even worse. There's also a wee bit of clean-up, as Fox's top is less revealing (a bit like Roxy/Poison in the Mega-CD port of Final Fight). As for stuff added in and changed, not a whole lot. The post-stage score counter is very different now, as it's based more on your overall score (and has new 'enemy defeated/quota met/quota missed' graphics, adapted from in-game sprites), and there's two post-boss surprises that I can never get to work in the arcade version... Morugalian Beta farts, and in this version it will hurt you, and you can punch Balbarotch's skull off and eat it for health... But doing so can cause it to explode which instantly kills you!
The other change warrants its own paragraph- the difficulty, on Normal at least, has been rebalanced considerably. Beyond the limited continues (three as standard, a max of five), the game feels a lot tougher in some parts as any enemies beyond standard issue thugs do a shit-ton more damage. In particular, the jet-pack enemies will ruin your health-bar, the Morugalians are considerably more powerful (with Morugalian Beta being massively more frustrating) and even the tiny lizards in Mission 3 will chip away a fair bit of health! And if you think you can avoid this sort of thing by playing on Easy, then nope- the game ends after Mission 3 on that mode (unless you use the cheat on The Cutting Room Floor to restore a Mission Select option). On the other hand, Dr. Crayborn on Mission 5 can no longer interrupt your combo attacks with his head attack quite so frequently, so that's something a little easier. On the whole though, this is a very solid port, just a shame it's prohibitively expensive these days...
... Well, there was another home port, but I don't think you'll be bothering with it for a few reasons. The game was included in Irem Arcade Hits for the PC, developed by DotEmu (whose work is, to be honest, a bit spotty but if you want the best home version of Rod-Land, it's their iPhone port of the game..?) and while the compilation does have some cracking titles like Hammerin' Harry and Dragon Breed, not a lot of effort went into it. It's basically a box of ROMs with a terrible front-end, minimal options, no extras and pretty much no heart. A bloody shame, really, 'cause a lot of the games in the collection have never been ported elsewhere... In any case, you might as well strike Undercover Cops off the game's roster because it's the World version, with all the baggage that carries. They said they were going to patch/update it to support the Japanese version of the game, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Ever.
Next, spin-off things and miscellaneous extras!
For a start, the game got one (1) straight-up spin-off game, Undercover Cops Gaiden: Hakaishin Garumaa for the original Game Boy.
Released in 1993, this is a very strange one- it's actually a tabletop boardgame kinda-thing with RPG elements. Selecting one of the three City Sweepers from the original game, you make your way across the board by using numbers in your possession (you'll always have five of them, ranging from 1 to 4) which determine how far you move (anything above 2 and the number of spaces is randomised). Along the way you'll find people who give you advice or free money and items, shops to buy items from, even a little Whack-a-Mole minigame where you have to knock out Moguralians, and of course actual battles, sometimes with dudes from the game! You use the same numbers in battle, where the person who picks the highest numbers gets to attack, and the other gets to defend, and you can attack, defend, use items, use a special that costs health or try and run, depending on whether you're attacking or defending. That's all there is to it, really.
Surprisingly, the game is pretty simple to play eeven if you can't read Japanese- most of it you can bluff your way through, and the Wikipedia page actually explains quite a lot of the basics. However, it is a little... Dull. Sadly these screenshots all come from the first stage because I really couldn't get to the end of it, I just got bored. Sorry! The Mgouralian Whack-a-Mole game is definitely the highlight here, as is all the new art of the characters, but... It's, you know, a thing, I guess.
The other major spin-off thing is the Gamest manga! No, really, this was an actual thing, a gag comic vaguely based on Undercover Cops (seemingly after the events of the game where our City Sweepers are unemployed with Fransowors as their landlady and Makaku as their debt collector... Until they blow up their house). There were at least two volumes, and you can read a translation of the first over at shmuplations.com on their page which also has a very strange set of interviews about Rosa. The reason she sticks her bum out for her jumping attack is partly because the designers wanted something other than a jump-kick, and also because the word she shouts, "Banpuu" was an in-joke amongst Irem employees. In fact, her voice actress was chosen from Irem employees based solely on how well they could say "Banpuu". And now you know the truth.
Finally, there's a tiny nod, easily missed, in Irem's series swansong R-Type Final.
In the Bydo Lab entry for Gains (Red Humanoid- 6th enemy on the list), it says its pilot used to be Captain Matt Gables.
It's that standard career progression, pro American football player > undercover cop > spaceship pilot.
I'm sure we'll see Irem again on this site someday!
YOU ARE SUCH BRAVE CITY SWEEPERS
