NARC (Midway Arcade Treasures 2)
Arcade Game
NARC plays like a typical side-scrolling shoot-'em-up arcade game from the 80s, it was design to eat your quarters, so the difficultly is going to be pretty high. The only reason why I got the Midway Arcade Treasures 2 on the PS2 was for this game. You can set the difficulty to 1, give yourself more lives and have infinity continues, but it's still not a very easy game to play.
Since the game comes from the late 80s, it has that message, "winners don't use drugs"... but killing is OK...
Gameplay
It makes no difference if you play the guy in blue or red, it's just a palette swap. Game play is pretty straight forward and easy, you have two weapons, a machine gun and a rocket launcher, save them when you need it. You'll find yourself ducking and firing and not even bothering to make arrests, "Your Busted!" I was only able to do so when I backed them into a corner, the edge of the screen, or when you come back being being killed you flash for a few seconds and you can't be touched.
Since it's an arcade game, there's of course no replay value. You might replay the game a few times once you get better at it or to get a higher score (my high score was 6,267,475), but after awhile, you'll get bored with it.
Soundtrack
The music is pretty good, it sets the tone of the game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RFfK6ZD_Ho
There are some problems when they emulated the game, the sound is prone to cutting out during game play, and during stage three, a glitch (usually triggered by crashing the player's vehicle into an enemy helicopter) caused the stage to end abruptly and then move on to the score tally screen).
The Arcade version is Better
Not only is it better than the NES version, but it's still far better than that crappy remake or reboot that was nothing but a poor GTA rip-off with generic cops. How sad is that… when an Arcade game from 1988 that's nothing more than a side-scrolling shoot-'em-up is better than a game from 2005… too many video game developers no loner make games that are fun to play.
They focus way too much on the graphics, on overused idiotic storylines and plots. What was the point in calling the remake/reboot "NARC" when it didn’t have anything from the original game????