Video Game / Narc 2005

You can walk the line, or you can cross it.

A remake of NARC done for the Playstation 2 and the original Xbox. It has a voice cast featuring Bill Belamy, Michael Madsen, Ron Perlman, Michael Wincott, Fred Tatasciore, and James Hong.

---

NARC features the following tropes:

• All There in the Manual: Mr. Big's name is only revealed in the manual, Sebastion Kale.
• Always Night: Every location in the game that takes place outside will always be during the night. This also includes when you travel to China and Boss Island.
• And This Is for...: Jack does this to Daniels near the ending. He shoots three bullets: the first for no reason, the second for shooting him, and the third for being a bitch.
• A Winner Is You: The remake has Mr. Big begging for a moment, only to be shot in the head by Marcus, who walks away as the ending music plays.
• Aesop Amnesia: The original arcade game treated drugs as bad. The 2005 remake treats drugs as power-ups.
• Character Model Karma Meter: Jack and Marcus will wear patrol uniforms instead of their regular outfits if you've lost enough badge points and then Junkie clothes if you've gotten kicked off the force.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: In the original game, Mr. Big gets his head blown up. Here he gets a bullet in the head.
• Disproportionate Retribution: At some point, Marcus needs to infiltrate a rave club. The moment one of the bodyguards mocks his vest at the entrance, Markus blows his cover and starts opening fire on everyone in sight.
  Daniels: You were supposed to infiltrate the rave not start a war!
  Marcus: Tell that to the pricks who opened fire!
  TehSnakerer: This is your fault!
  • He took the insult a little too far.
    Daniels: I'm sending a support unit with some riot suppression gear.
    Marcus: Fuck that! Tell them to bring a nuke!
• Drugs Are Bad: Inverted, the remake reverses this by treating drugs as powerups (for instance, crack temporarily makes you a "crack shot.") Use them too often, though, and you get addicted to them, meaning you need methadone to get back to normal.
• Excuse Plot: The story attempts to set up a Buddy Cop Show duo of Jack and Marcus trying to fight the massive drug cartels, corrupt officers and crimes all around, and also a moral or two about how Drugs Are Bad thanks to Jack's severe withdrawals, but it's so threadbare, no one really has any exploration or depth beneath the surface besides Mr. Big's daughter who is The Mole as the red-haired investigations officer Daniels, and the ending is less than a minute long. You're here to shoot shit and beat crooks up, and that's all you really get.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Liquid Soul. In gameplay, the drug turns all of your melee attacks into One-Hit Kills. The one character that uses this in a cutscene, on the other hand, is brought back from the brink of death and gets infinite ammo for his submachine gun.
  • Marcus is fiercely Anti-Drug in cutscenes but can take as much drugs and be as corrupt as Jack in gameplay.
• Guide Dang It!: There is a van that sells you weapons. It exists at random, doesn't appear on the minimap, and the player is never told about its existence unless they read the manual, and even then it only mentions that it sells guns, not how it's hidden from the radar and randomly appears/disappears from several locations. Even if you do know about it, there's a good chance that you will never find it unless you are low on cash.
• Human Resources: The big late game reveal is that Liquid Soul is, for whatever reason, made from people. The story doesn't really go further on how or why.
• Karma Meter: You have Badge Points, which increase with turning in evidence/arresting criminals and decrease for killing civilians and other Bad Cop actions, lose enough Badge Points and you'll be demoted to street cop and have to gain more to be able to proceed in the main story again, lose more and you'll be kicked off the force and have to solve street crimes without even a badge and gun to get back to being a street cop and eventually back into detective to be able to continue the story, cops will also open fire on you if you're caught committing crimes while kicked off the force.
• Luck-Based Mission: Selling drugs is this as you'll randomly get bust by undercover cops and lose everything, LSD may allow you to see genuine criminals but it's awkward to use. (Since LSD unequips your drugs and switches back to your fists and hides the HUD, so you have to memorize how many buttons to press to equip the drug you want to sell.)
• Villain Ball: The entire plot of Mr. Big and his daughter was to use the NARC duo to arrest and kill every ounce of their competition off the streets (which also included people that worked for them) so that their own drug enterprise would reign unmatched. The problem is that by doing this, they not only show their hands and effectively bring the protagonists to their evil lair, but do an absolutely awful job of covering their tracks or doing anything attempting to stop them until the entire rest of the organization is dead. Then they get swiftly killed for this too.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Jack gets shot in the endgame by The Mole, Marcus proceeds to fight and then get shot by her, only for Jack to get back up and shoot her fatally (three times) before fighting Mr. Big, and then the ending shows Marcus killing Mr. Big and walking away with no Jack in sight.