Nerding Day: Beverly Hills Cop for PlayStation 2 (Patreon)

I think we can all agree that Beverly Hills Cop is a generation-defining movie. Unfortunately, the generation it defined is slowly dying from old age. This has nothing to do with the movie series and more to do with the slow, painful passage of time that robs us of everything. Things that used to be easy, like enjoying an Eddie Murphy film where he plays a street-smart Detroit cop who has to visit the strange, sunny world of Beverly Hills to hunt down a murderer, are now more difficult. Axel Foley may be tough as nails, but that’s no match for needing to ask your grandchildren how to use a Roku remote without hitting that goddamn Hulu button.

I’m joking, of course. That’s what we do here. We josh around. Beverly Hills Cop is a perfectly good movie from the 1980s that’s probably best known for Eddie Murphy’s comedic timing, Eddie Murphy’s Muppet-style laugh, and Eddie Murphy’s theme song in the movie. Anything else you think you remember from the movie is actually from Lethal Weapon. Even if you’re certain it’s from Beverly Hills Cop, it’s definitely Lethal Weapon. A character could say, “I’m Axel Foley, and I sure am a Beverly Hills Cop” and you’d still be in Lethal Weapon land. It’s something deep in your psyche that you thought you forgot, like Seaman for Dreamcast.

Fortunately, if you did want some new Beverly Hills Cop memories that aren’t related to Danny Glover’s best work outside of Predator 2, there’s an entire PlayStation game featuring Axel Foley! Actually, it’s PlayStation 2, but it looks like PlayStation 1. No, scratch that. It looks like an indie horror game that covers up its lack of budget by adopting a PlayStation 1-style aesthetic that doesn’t quite carry it over the finish line. If you’ve ever played a first-person shooter on the Nintendo DS, you’re almost there on the graphical quality of Axel Foley’s greatest adventure.

And, my Lord in Heaven, what an adventure it is! Whether you’re exploring a dock, a warehouse, or a warehouse on a dock, Beverly Hills Cop for the PlayStation 2 does it all! It’s a shame this game was only released in Europe under shady circumstances that were probably related to money laundering and murder, because playing this really is a chance to explore the depths of human emotion and wondering how many times you have to click on a door to open it. The answer is a lot. You’ve really gotta spam that X button to get it open.

So! Beverly Hills Cop: The Video Game: Based on Homer’s The Odyssey is a first-person shooter in which you play Axel Foley. Now, if you’re used to seeing Eddie Murphy as Axel Foley, you might be surprised to learn that they’ve replaced him with a racially ambiguous man who looks like a grown-up version of the child from Bully. Of course, getting the rights to a movie star’s likeness is hard. The developer could’ve gone with a look-alike model or something in the ballpark. Instead, they just traveled to an entirely different stadium and made Axel Foley kind of white and kind of not white depending on the lighting in that particular section of warehouse. In this way, Axel Foley becomes all of us.

Is it strange that Axel Foley looks less like our beloved Beverly Hills Cop and more like Ethan Suplee? A little bit! I’d call it “problematic,” but this is a game that doesn’t have problems: It has solutions. Also, if a video game is problematic in the woods and there’s nobody to post about it, does it actually trigger a feeling? Philosophers have asked that very question for years, to which other philosophers often replied, “What?”

You’ll also find upon starting the game that the famous Axel Foley / Eddie Murphy / Beverly Hills Cop theme song has been changed. You might worry this ruins the experience by taking out such an iconic piece of music. Fortunately, the new theme sounds like a child’s second attempt at bashing out the actual theme on a Casio keyboard after hearing it once. It’s interesting in the same way that me trying to recite an entire Shakespeare play from heart is interesting: It’s a complete failure on a level that elevates it beyond success. Sort of like everything in life.

I want to stick with the sound design for a second because it’s truly wonderful. We don’t have the right theme music at the beginning of the game, but at least we also don’t have any music at all during the game at any other point. It’s dead silent. When you’re walking through those warehouses, you really feel yourself walking through an empty, mundane, absolutely pointless warehouse that is inexplicably filled with stairwells blocked off by invisible walls. Don’t worry, at least you can access computers that look like someone accidentally orgasmed onto the screen. I know that’s gross, but so is crime.

The fact is, there’s almost no sound at all! Every so often you hear gunfire, but everything else is just subtitled like a quirky silent film. Guard sees you? No voice work. Cutscene? No voice work. Little moments of dialogue? Hey! Guess what? No! Voice! Work! This might annoy some modern video game players, but a lot of us grew up with games that featured all the talking in text bubbles. You know, except there was usually music in those scenes. Or sound effects. Literally any sound at all. A phone being picked up. A desk being slammed. Anything. Instead, this game makes an incredibly artistic choice to just not have sound most of the time outside of guns and exhaust vents.

Wait, let me stop there. I will say that the greatest part of this game is the exhaust vents. They make a really nice, white-noise-style pleasing sound that was kind of a brain massage. Since enemies don’t really shoot at you unless you’re standing next to them, I spent a few relaxed minutes near exhaust vents just listening to some nice fan noises. It’s incredible that twenty years later, people are still finding ways to love this game! Seriously, if this site supported sound effects like it was the 1998 internet, I’d be posting so many sweet, calming breeze sounds.

And that’s the only calming part, because otherwise Beverly Hills Cop for PlayStation 2 is all action! But sometimes it’s stealth! But sometimes it’s a hunt for a tiny object hidden somewhere in a cavernous level with zero signposting whatsoever. Not only does this make for a more exciting adventure within the game itself, it also gives us all an opportunity to appreciate the hard work that yellow paint has been doing in today’s games. “Oooo, wah, wah, wah, I’m tired of being told I can climb a ladder with yellow paint!” Good. Then you’ll love this shit. You’ll get the briefest of slices of a shard of information and just walk around bumping into walls until you get the object that requires you to then bump into other walls.

As I said, this is all played out as a first-person shooter. I kind of suspect that the original design doc was more Grand Theft Auto-focused considering this game out late in the PlayStation 2’s lifecycle and the levels are strewn with cars that you can’t use. But instead of an open world in which you can do anything, INCLUDING BEING A COP, you’re in a closed world where you have no choice but to be a cop. If you ask me, that’s actually far, far more realistic. In Grand Theft Auto, you can steal a taxi, kill a man, and then play golf. In Beverly Hills Cop, you can kill a man. So, in a way, they did capture some of GTA.

Another reason this game reads as a Grand Theft Auto clone (even if it’s a clone that emerged from a broken tube whispering, “Kill me. Please. This hurts.”) is because of the cutscenes. They tend to feature Axel Foley talking to someone else about a series of crimes that… I’m gonna be really honest, I don’t completely understand. This might be an attempt to portray the complicated, oftentimes confusing life of a police officer. When uncovering an international conspiracy, you don’t always know how far it goes and who’s involved. It’s also possible that the developers of this game thought an interesting story was having a variety of identical-looking characters say, “Have you checked the next warehouse?” If you’ve ever wanted a combination of a cutscene and a mission briefing without the benefit of either, oh baby, you’re gonna be in paradise.

But the real fun is once you get to the gameplay. I’ve already said that most of it takes place in dark warehouses and areas that are outside warehouses, right? Right. But here’s the thing about being a cop: sometimes you’ve got to approach a warehouse with stealth and sometimes you’ve got to approach a warehouse with guns a-blazing. Cops in modern society often choose the second option, but we all love a good stealth mission! There is nothing more fun on this planet than being forced to slowly crawl past guards you could easily kill while getting sent back to the very beginning if one spots you. We know players must love it because those devs keep putting it back in! Woo!

Beverly Hills Cop helps cut the divide between stealth and violence by making only one mandatory at a time but never really telling you which is which. Sometimes you’ll be in a warehouse full of guards and need to creep past them to get to a machine or a set of keys. If the baddie sees you, they silently shout with a subtitle for help and you’re sent back to the last checkpoint. Luckily, the devs added some challenge to this by not having any checkpoints. You just get kicked all the way to the beginning of the level. Don’t you fret: There are no lives in this game, so you can keep repeating the same stealth sections again and again for eternity until you curse God and ask for your soul to be erased from his sight.

Usually once you get past an arbitrary point in a level, you’re cleared to just kill everyone. Why couldn’t you kill anyone on your way into the warehouse if you’re going to blast them all to death after? That’s cop business. You gotta go by the protocol. You’re not allowed to unload an infinite amount of ammo into bad guys without getting in their home first like a vampire. Vampire’s law is up there with Zeus’s law in terms of law stuff that we all know. Oh, and also you’ll routinely bully nerdy security guards for keys and information. How do you do this? By walking up to them. How do you do that? By approaching a door, clicking three times to open it, and then stepping back so the door can swing the wrong way.

Also, don’t get too comfortable: There are six whole levels in this game, each clocking in about 10-15 minutes. So fair warning: If you’re a completionist trying to 100% the game, you might have to carve out your entire lunch break.

But it’s the shooting in the game where things really shine. This is some of my favorite gunplay I’ve ever experienced in a game. It’s a bit like GoldenEye but with worse controls and worse weapons. But what I love about it is that, in this universe, bullets don’t hurt people! You can shoot a guy fifteen to twenty times before he notices. We could have an entire world in which firing a gun is less risky than flinging a rubber band. Imagine how much better our lives would be if that was always the case. “Oh, did you hear what happened at that school! Students were really inconvenienced!” That may be a dark joke, but Beverly Hills Cop wants us to know it doesn’t have to be that way.

One of your biggest advantages in this game is that you can duck and basically avoid all bullet damage. That’s the trick. Kneeling won’t help you much in stealth; the guards can see through cars and buildings because they’re that good. But kneeling does make it so no matter how much you get shot, you barely feel it. I cleared wave after wave of bad guys in a warehouse by just taking a knee like a guy proposing in a park in front of a truly embarrassed woman. This is not a game that wants to challenge your skill. It’s a game that wants to show you there are a lot of bad guys in the world who need a very, very, very slow pummeling of bullets.

I think what makes Beverly Hills Cop so fascinating is that it shows such a different side to being a police officer. Whether or not you consider that “Copaganda,” I can’t say. But it’s a relief to see a world in which crimes are solved by pantomiming words. It’s refreshing to play a game in which bullet-based guns and bubble-based guns would have the same efficacy. And it’s heartwarming to be able to live in a version of Beverly Hills Cop that doesn’t have anything that made the original movie great.

Because it allows us to create our own Beverly Hills Cop, which, as we all know, is the friends we made along the way.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: M Jahi Chappell, who gave Axel Foley the computer password and received five years in jail as a thank-you.

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