I find excessive police force in ‘80s and ‘90s video games and movies to be pretty amusing. The idea that a police officer operating outside the rule of law is the perfect heroic archetype is extremely naive, especially when it’s often coupled with a high body count. It makes sense that you’d want a hero who is allowed to indiscriminately murder, even if that’s not a good policy in reality. However, it’s damned entertaining.

Taito’s Chase H.Q. series is pretty exemplary of this. Criminals attempt to evade the law, and your job is to chase down their vehicle and ram it until it’s completely inoperable. Fuck any pedestrian or civilian vehicle that gets in your way. Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few spines. Justice must be served.

WE FIND THE CAR OF CRIMINALS

The Chase H.Q. series is rather sprawling and involves a bunch of different ports, and I can’t claim to have played all of them. However, the typical formula is that you first have to catch up to the criminal within a certain timeframe, at which point your clock is refilled. Then, you have to take down the criminal’s car within the remaining time by smashing into it a specific number of times.

Super Chase: Criminal Termination is the third-ish game in the series, depending on your math. The biggest change it has over the first two-ish games is that it’s mainly first-person. Sort of like Rad Mobile. And that’s rad. It cranks up the absurdity factor a couple notches, and since the series was already pretty absurd, that says a lot.

The premise is exactly the same, however. There are five stages. A crime happens, and you have to stop the perpetrator. Likewise, it’s still a raster racer, so it isn’t true 3D, instead using a common graphical trick to simulate a 3D road. I love raster racers. They often have a ridiculous sense of speed, helped by the fact that the draw distance is rarely far ahead.

ARREST THEM RIGHT AWAY!

S.C.I.: Special Criminal Investigation (the second arcade title) hilariously allowed you to shoot at other vehicles, which I’m sure is a necessary step to any special investigation. That’s been removed for Super Chase, possibly because of the first-person perspective, though that didn’t stop Namco’s Lucky & Wild. Or maybe they got a stern warning from the chief.

Regardless, Super Chase is somehow more absurd than the previous games. Tracks are far more cluttered, your car shows damage as you bash into things (even though it’s indestructible), and things explode. There are also more dangers and obstacles on the road. S.C.I. added enemy cohorts who would try to block you from taking out your target. Super Chase has that, plus they might shoot at you, or they might throw dynamite at your, or a helicopter might strafe at you from above. Getting shot apparently drops time off your clock, but either I didn’t get hit very much or it didn’t take off enough time for me to notice.

It’s, as we’ve established, absurd. The first two games barely had hills, and Super Chase throws jumps and narrow roads your way constantly. What’s really amusing is that it’s a cakewalk to keep your car on the road. A cakedrive. A lot of raster racers, to varying extents, help you with corners as a side-effect of how curves are drawn. The Chase H.Q. games have always done this pretty noticeably. However, it’s always been possible to slide off the road. Usually, a game forces you to slow down occasionally on tight turns. There’s no such need in Super Chase. Don’t even take your foot of the gas. From what I can tell, the brake is a digital button rather than an axis, so there’s no point in even using it. Brakes are for the weak and indecisive, anyway, and we’re cops.

THE SERIAL KILLER ARNOLD

Nancy returns as your handler. She introduces every mission by telling you what you’re up against. Actually, that’s not entirely true. In the previous games, she introduced the mission, but in Super Chase, the mission is set off by a cutscene showing the crime happening. So, she just tells you what you saw.

That’s okay, though, because now her face appears on a big screen and her scenes have additional details to them, like her flipping her hair before turning to the camera in the intro for exactly one mission. It’s nice.

Also, all the dialogue is hilarious. When you’re running out of time to take down the bad guy, she’ll start a transmission to say, “This is Nancy, they’re moving very fast, over and out!” Thanks, dear. It’s very sweet of you to give us that update while the front of our car is in the backseat of theirs.

My favourite dialogue is during the second mission, which opens with a dude blowing up a house for some reason. He’s a terrorist. You take him down and one of the officers says, “You’re such a troublemaker! You’re under arrest for terrorism bombing!” Yeah, that’ll put an end to his shenanigans, the mischievous little imp.

There’s text during the attract demo at the beginning of the game which also demonstrates Taito’s translation skills. “Pass them up, cut them off and bring them to justis,” it reads. That’s awful. I just can’t forgive the lack of Oxford comma.

KNOW WHY I PULLED YOU OVER?

Perhaps as a way to off-set the fact that you don’t have to try very hard to stay on the road, Super Chase features some pretty annoying physics. I was originally going to type “frustrating,” but it’s not even really that.

Simply put, it’s hard to tell where the edges of your vehicle are. This is largely because of the first-person perspective. So, sometimes it will look like you have total clearance, but you might not. Add to this the fact that you have no peripheral vision, so by swerving to miss one thing, you might hit another in your massive blind spot. And your car likes to bounce off of things, which might be a carry-over from the previous games but is more of a problem here.

The reason why this is annoying rather than frustrating is because very little stops your car. If you hit the wall of a tunnel, for example, it might imperceptibly slow your car down, but mostly you just see sparks fly. You can drive straight into an explosion, and, like bullets, it might shave off some time from your clock, but it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference.

BROUGHT TO JUSTIS

There are five levels in the game, and the first time through, I had to continue four times, and the second time through I shaved that down to three credits. It’s not a particularly hard game on the default difficulty settings. In all, a round-trip is about 15-minutes.

Honestly, my complaints of poor driving control and threadbare gameplay seem substantial. My shoulders instinctively feel as though they should shrug. But now, displaced from the game itself, I can’t help but still feel excited about Super Chase: Criminal Termination. It is just such a ridiculous and entertaining game. 

It reminds me of Taito’s own Elevator Action Returns in how excessively energetic it feels. I’m discovering that Taito had this run in the ‘90s where they seemed to say, “What if we took this game, but pushed it far beyond sense.” So we got familiar, but screwball genre takes like Kaiser Knuckle and Growl. If I walked into an arcade and saw Elevator Action Returns and Super Chase right next to each other, I’d momentarily recall the feeling of joy. Granted, Elevator Action Returns is a ridiculous game, but it marries it with substantial gameplay, which I think is preferable. However, as it turns out, that sort of joyfully excessive style can stand on its own just fine. Especially in an arcade.

7/10

This review was conducted using a ROM copy of the game using MAME. If it ever gets re-released on modern platforms, you know I’ll be there.