Besides being a Marvel Comics universe character, The Punisher is an arcade computer game written by Capcom during the early 1990s, using the Marvel franchise character of the same name.
Video game theme was mostly in the same vein as other Capcom beat-em-up's that were side-scrolling, featured pick-up weapons, desperation moves activated by pressing both attack buttons, end of level bosses, and extremely high difficulty levels.
Particularly nifty features of this engine include:
- Pressing 1P or 2P didn't necessarily mean one or two players, actually meant which side of the machine you wanted to play on, and assigned you the character Punisher, or Nick Fury respectively.
- Highly interactive environments - nearly everything in the game that wasn't an obvious background was destroyable or when broken revealed a powerup or weapon of some sort.
- Huge array of weapons to choose from, guns included, this being a pretty new and nifty feature to beat-em-up's in general. Your character was also equipped with his own pistol, which he would pull out whenever an enemy with a gun was on screen, not including guns that could be knocked from enemies hands. As an aside note, a neat trick was to keep an easy enemy who always had a gun around, and shoot everyone else on the screen except him. It made scenes where you were mobbed with enemies considerably easier.
- Weapons having a visible lifetime. Obviously a balancing mechanism, so that players couldn't hang on to a weapon forever, making things a lot easier. Other beat-em-ups of the same genre had a similar mechanism but didn't show how long your weapon lasted, so you were forced to learn through experience how long it'd take before your lovely baseball bat disappeared.
- Context sensitive use of items. For example, pick up a knife. From a long distance, default action is to throw it. If you were sufficiently close to an enemy, your knife would flash in your hand and you would stab the enemy for considerable damage (and nice blood sprays), making the knife a much more effective weapon.
- First beat-em-up to feature throwing of weapons from a jump. Especially useful for sharp items, such as the katana, knife and axe, as it caused major damage to a single or multiple enemies if grouped together, all for only one use of the item, in the case of the sword and axe.
- Ability to pick up and throw enemies for use as weapons. Quite cool, this.
- Hidden special move - pressing down, then up and attack performed a flash-kick like manouveur, while, being limited in range, did quite good damage for being free, and hit/knocked-down multiple enemies.
By the time this game was produced Capcom had pretty much perfected the art of the side-scrolling beat-em-up, and I believe this game to be near the peak of the genre. It was devillishly hard, but once one knew all the tricks to the game it became fairly routine to complete the game on one credit, which quite often gathered a crowd in the arcades.
Made on the CPS system, this game has been emulated for quite some time in MAME, Callus, and other assorted emulation systems.