It’s unusual to see a game, especially an arcade game, that doesn’t feature you trying to guide your character to some noble goal: saving the world, rescuing folks in distress, or trying to survive in a futuristic maze of death. But Police Trainer doesn’t ask you to do any of those things. Instead it asks you to perform a series of exercises to become a police officer in Metro City.
All this game is is a series of drills designed to make you better at wielding a gun. Though the situations that are presented are strictly police-officer friendly, playing this game will actually make you better at other similar games. You’re constantly drilled on accuracy, speed, pattern recognition, analysis, and combinations of the above. The better you do, the better ranking you get, eventually making your way up to chief of police. And you’re really motivated to do just that, since the last six or so folks who did that are the only ones allowed to put their names in the high score table.
I played this game an awful lot, regularly blowing through my ‘two for one’ token allotment and could actually see a marked improvement in games like The House of the Dead. It’s like investing in one was paying dividends in the other, which was a completely foreign concept to me.
But I think that my favorite Police Trainer moment was during one Saturday night at one of my local arcades. The off-duty police officer that was hired to keep the peace decided to play some games to pass the time, and he decided to play Police Trainer. His reaction time was a little low, but his accuracy was spot on, which is kind of cool, but the image I have of the police officer, in full uniform and in proper shooting stance, playing a video game about police officer training was just ‘meta’ enough to make this one of my all time favorite shooters.