I was once asked a simple question: “What advice would you give your younger self?” After much deliberation, I eventually settled on an answer:
Buy a rice cooker.
See, I was taught to cook at a (relatively) young age by my father. My dad had owned and was the head chef of a restaurant, so (surprising no one that has ever met a chef) he had opinions on food preparation. And of the many lessons he taught me, one that I internalized completely was that “making” some foodstuff was always better than just “opening” something. Sure, you could unscrew that jar of alfredo sauce and have a quick dinner, but wouldn’t you rather make a white sauce from scratch? Of course you would! It’s better! You know what is in it, you can make it to please your own palate, and putting in the time makes it taste better! Everything tastes better when you add effort!
I am not going to say I spent decades avoiding the microwave or never opening a can of gravy (“Ragu” is Italian for failure), but I did maintain this thinking through adulthood. There are a million “as seen on TV” products and another galaxy of “premade” foods out there, but I was going to diligently stick to my practiced pots ‘n pans and raw ingredients. I was not a complete slave to the kitchen: I did find ways to stretch a meal into leftovers so I did not have to cook for hours literally every day. But I held to the belief that the old ways were best, and “upgrading” to an instant pot or other “easy” appliance was the way of malcontents. I made food the real way, and it tasted real good.
And then I bought a rice cooker.
Full disclosure: I have never been good at rice. To me, it is an eternal side dish, so I do not show rice preparation the same care I would afford the main entrée. Also, I simply preferred potatoes in their various forms for years, and that meant less rice practice. That said, I know I was never able to make rice to the standards I had seen in restaurants. That delightful, fluffy sushi rice? Completely impossible. Maybe I never got the water ratio right? Or would not “steam” long enough? Who knows. And the flavor! Short of sticking chicken broth in there, I could not get rice to taste like anything other than “white”. I knew there was better rice out there! I had experienced it! Just how the heck was I supposed to get it to appear on my dinner table!?
Then I bought a rice cooker, and it just… did it. I put in rice. I put in water. Done. Now I get perfect rice in a half hour. It is unequivocally better than any rice I have ever made “by scratch”. It is light. It is fluffy. I can experiment with various spices (and kelps), and get different flavors. It is everything I ever wanted. The rice cooker even has advantages I never expected! If I am absolutely dying due to some malady, it takes practically zero effort to pour rice and water into a rice cooker. This means I can have a warm, vaguely nutritious meal available even when I am in the grips of The Clench. And rice cooker rice can sit for a while, too! I can “start it”, completely forget what I am doing because I am playing an arcade game from 1988, and then come back an hour to prepared rice! I just need to have uncooked rice somewhere in my house, water, and electricity, and I will never go hungry again!
In short, the humble rice cooker proved one thing to me: there are devices in this world that exist exclusively to make life better with zero downsides. Give or take the cost of a rice cooker (I got mine for around $20, and Amazon confirms that model is still available at the same price over a decade later), nothing had to be “spent” to get this rice bounty, and there is no downside to the ease of use. Years of internalizing “easy = worse” were wrong. The rice cooker simply makes my meals simpler, faster, and more convenient.
But you know what ain’t a rice cooker? A.I.
Or, as I have noted it in my site tags, “Artificial Intelligence But Not Really”. It is 2026, so we are talking about “A.I.” as has been presented for the last few years by the likes of OpenAI or X: The Everything App. A.I. is not “artificial intelligence” that thinks and communicates and has opinions on whether or not Dave can do things, this is “artificial intelligence” that is your computer slave employee. Want to write a book? Key in some themes, characters names, and how many pages you would like to see, and A.I. will crank it out for you. Or do you want some art? Tell that delightful A.I. you want a scenic vista to display on your wall, and you’ll have it sent to the printer by lunchtime. Or maybe something a little more… risqué? Tifa Lockhart plus big boobs plus centaur plus only underwear plus extra big boobs coming right up! The A.I. will even calculate where underwear is supposed to go on a centaur! The answer may surprise you, but that’s how computers work! They can imagine things the human mind could never comprehend!
Except… that is the problem with A.I. We know for a fact that A.I. is 100% trained on preexisting, human-made products. Books, drawings, and everything ever written on Reddit has been shoved into an A.I. woodchipper. To ignore the fact that 99% of creators did not consent to this theft (which, yes, is akin to stating that you are going to calculate your monthly budget while ignoring the $10,000,000 you devote annually to horse-based gacha), this creates a unique problem about uniqueness: A.I. cannot be unique. Or, to be precise, A.I. can theoretically meld and merge words and images into something never before seen on the planet Earth, but that is mostly because its “unique” productions are poop from a butt. The best yield A.I. can generate is overwhelmingly something that can be described as “like this one popular thing, but slightly different.” The worst A.I. can generate is “Will Smith is eating spaghetti, and he has seventeen vestigial mouths”. A.I. has been touted as the future for at least three years now, but we have yet to see A.I. produce a book you must read, or a piece of art you must see. Where is A.I. Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence? Oh, right, we keep being told that an A.I. movie is just around the corner. But we’ll see A Confederacy of Dunces in theatres before anyone pays to see a “virtual” actress. We already have Hatsune Miku at home!
And the insidious thing about “A.I. can only produce variations on already produced(/stolen) works?” Well, there are people that have only ever wanted exactly that.
Let me speak to my expertise: I am a computer guy, but the way I have survived for my adulthood is working for various small businesses. I do not live in an area where someone can go get a job for Microsoft or Apple, so “learn to code” means you can code a website for someone’s restaurant. Consequently, practically from day one of my professional life, “computer guy” has had 100% overlap with advertising. There is a simple evolution there: whether it be a focus on Facebook, a public website, or even just signs within a store, it is assumed that “that computer guy” is going to do it all. You would never think that the busboy being paid minimum wage knows how to use Photoshop (or, if you are a business owner, you are not going to respect the output of the guy you are paying slave wages), so let’s ask the computer guy to make something. He already had to make a logo for the website, I bet he can take a thousand appetizing pictures of our entire menu, too! And, before you know it, “can you set up this new point of sale system we got sold” transforms into “every button has to have a picture of every product, because it is cheaper to hire people that cannot read English,” followed instantly by, “hey, while you are making those pictures anyway, could you put them on the website? Great.” And so it goes. It is the nature of the beast, and being hired to produce anything that is seen by employees or the public is going to incidentally include several tasks outside the sphere of “computer science”. All anybody sees in that degree is “computer”. You’re good at computers, you must be able to do literally every task that has ever been attached to a mouse.
So here is a hard fact I learned from all of these “extra” jobs I have been asked to do over the years: Business owners hate having to ask for anything.
This is universal to humanity. Everything expects everything to be perfect forever. Yes, even if you are a pessimist, or believe you are the most cursed soul on the planet (thanks for reading, Dad!), there is still some part of you that genuinely thinks the status quo will continue indefinitely, and any interruptions are the machinations of a vengeful God. Nothing lasts forever! It is 100% natural that things decay, change, and/or get replaced over time. But tell me you do not think it is a punishment every time you have to call a plumber (or landlord) because your toilet’s various pieces have deteriorated. Tell me you presumed the local GameStop would stay open forever, even though 95% of your gaming dollars have been spent online. Tell me you expect Sony to continue to produce physical discs even though every global factor that exists makes digital distribution the more profitable option. You know what is “normal”, and it is 100% natural to expect the world to conform to your beliefs. And that is itself normal: you are a creature of pattern recognition, and if the patterns aren’t recognizing, then the planet is broken. On some level, you want things to stay the same, just the same as everyone else.
And it is my experience that business owners believe that everything should be easy. Or, to be more specific, by virtue of owning a business, many believe they have already graduated past everyone else’s plebian problems. You have and are running a business! The hard part is over! So now you just have to pay a bunch of employees to handle everything from waiting tables to accounting, and you can kick back and be the boss. Yes, any business owner reading this is vehemently objecting to this characterization, but let’s be honest: that is part of the bit. You can talk a big game about how you are the most important person in the business, but you are not the person on the floor eight days a week. You are the person making the hard decisions, and these decisions are… not that hard? Like should you pay someone to take a picture of that eggplant parmesan for the online ads? Or could you just, ya know, copy and paste something from Google Image Search, and not have to take a single dime out of your pocket? Who is going to know? This minor sin going to summon the picture police? Is that even a thing? Nah, just take the easiest, cheapest route to whatever works. That is the true job of the business owner: reduce costs, and take the easiest path forward, because anything else is a drain on the business owner. And that’s you! If anyone asks, you are doing it for the business itself. You are a job creator! You are doing this for the community!
A.I. is doing nothing for the community. A.I. is the new zenith in selfish technology. It has been advertised as the “solution” to having to hire someone to take pictures, design a logo, or even write an email requesting someone design a logo. It is the ultimate assistant that exists so you can get back to the job of claiming you are doing something. And, what’s more, it is literally programmed to tell you what you want to hear. Even beyond the omnipresent tone of a toady and the quantifiable need to please (because then you will keep using the product), A.I. can be “rerolled”. If A.I. says something you do not want to hear, you can tell it to say something else until it produces the desired result. We have reached the point in the A.I. lifecycle where court transcripts have confirmed this: You will be told you are doing something right, even if that answer is completely wrong.
You know, like RoboCop.
(The game, not the guy. The guy would never.)
If you thought today’s screed about A.I. was only tangentially related to a game based on a movie where a dystopian hellscape is accentuated by reckless technology that mechanically strips the humanity out of good men, then you are only part right. RoboCop’s basic premise did inspire its inevitable entwinement with today’s article. But! The plight of Alex Murphy is only half the story today. RoboCop the game has its own problems!
RoboCop is a 1988 arcade title by Data East. To place that on the videogame history timetable, RoboCop (Arcade) was released the same year as Dragon Quest (not Warrior) 3, (NES) Bionic Commando, and Mega Man 2 (in Japan). Also, Japan saw that Super Mario Bros. 3 game that you may have heard about from a local wizard. But even though we remember technological advancements through console generations, the arcade had been going strong in 1988. This was the year we saw Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, Double Dragon II: The Revenge, and Altered Beast. Arcade games were established! This was no longer the age of Space Invaders or Asteroids where designers just kinda tossed things at the wall to see what might work. No one is going to mistake Altered Beast for Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, but the general style of the time was intrinsic: move left to right, fight some dudes, get some powerups, and there is a boss every stage. Difficulty escalates (to possibly ridiculous levels), and eventually you get to the credits. Whether you were a werewolf or a postapocalyptic brawl-boy, you knew what it would take to beat the game.
And RoboCop follows the familiar mold of other 1988 titles. In fact, it follows one very specific 1988 title, Bad Dudes vs. DragonNinja, which had been released by Data East prior to RoboCop. Basically, if it worked for Bad Dudes, it would work for RoboCop. Except RoboCop is much more ready for his world of super violence than any bad dude, as RoboCop showed up with a gun. The attract mode and opening of RoboCop seems to imply you will only be armed in specific situations, but once you get past the first half of the first level, RoboCop never has reason to holster his piece ever again. Hence, RoboCop punches through bad guys for roughly thirty seconds, and the rest of the game is all about aiming. They have guns, you have guns, and it is your prime directive to shoot the heck out of everyone else before RoboCop gets sent to the scrap heap (which is an entire level!). If you have been sent back in time to take the place of a Data East executive attempting to pitch RoboCop, just go with “it is Contra with bigger sprites.” Then you can knock off for drinks before the George Michael concert.
Yet, if you told me RoboCop (1988, arcade) was designed by A.I., I would believe you.
No, this is not a complaint that the ED-209 has too many fingers. The issue is that RoboCop has the exact same arc as… Is it too esoteric to cite the “evil” arcade owner in Wayne’s World? RoboCop is precisely what you would expect from a game designed to make money at the expense of the players: the first two stages are straightforward and empowering, and then the difficulty ramps up to literally unfair levels. RoboCop’s opponents crowd the screen to the point that the machine cannot process so much action without slowdown, and nothing is given to the player to compensate for this increased assault. RoboCop has limited mobility, no mercy invincibility, and one health bar between him and a game over. He instantly respawns upon agreeing to continue, but this encourages the structure to be unreasonable. If RoboCop had to restart at some checkpoint, you would realize pretty quickly when you ran into a sticking point that barred further progress. But with save-state-esque continues, you can pick up in the same firefight, and declare victory through sheer attrition. So keep pumping in those quarters, kiddies, and eventually you will save the day. More money, more progress!
Ultimately, this makes RoboCop feel like it was designed via A.I. prompt. “A game based on a popular franchise with good graphics, but make the difficulty steadily boil into impossibility by about the halfway point. By the final stage, make it impossible to make progress without adding credits every ten seconds. Add random dudes with chainsaws for flare.” And there. That’s RoboCop. It is a game that is fun to play and pretty to look at, but it was also 100% designed with an eye on making the accountants at Data East very happy. And it was successful! RoboCop was the highest grossing arcade game of 1988 in Hong Kong, and was noted as the second most successful arcade game in Japan in 1989. Making a lot of money does not necessarily mean RoboCop was bad or predatory! But playing RoboCop in 2026 and comparing it to its contemporary brethren does confirm it was designed with its revenue stream in mind. The limited hit points and checkpoints of Ghosts ‘n Goblins may make the experience difficult, but it is an honest difficulty where you can conquer entire stages without taking a hit. There is no avoiding the hails of gunfire in RoboCop. You are going to die, and you are going to insert a new coin. You are going to win, but it will cost you.
And that is the thing about A.I.: it costs more than tokens.
Look, I’m a judgmental guy. If you want to support Dave Chappelle, J. K. Rowling, Louis C.K., Woody Allen, or the Saudi Royal Family, I am not going to hesitate to remind you that you are doing so at the expense of vulnerable people. There is a reason this blog is never going to review a wizard boy game, and it still hurts that that reasoning now applies to the latest Fatal Fury jaunt. Similarly, if you are using A.I., I am going to judge you. I understand why it happens! I recognize that sometimes you just want to take the easy route to a solution. I cannot tell you how many times I have been looking at a blank Word document with a perfect idea in my head for an article, but the words are not coming together. I would love to press a button and just fill in the blanks of an easy example, a second illustration, and a third thing that really ties it all together. I would even accept an em dash to get there! Is this the rice cooker thing all over again? Why not just take the easy route, and have some delicious rice with the press of a button?
But A.I. is not a rice cooker, and this is a situation where dear old dad was right about there being a cost for convenience. A.I. does not democratize art, it steals art. Big titty goth centaur Tifa (“Hey, the original example didn’t include ‘goth’, why is that…” “I’m in a mood!”) cranked out by the A.I. service is built on the works of people that were not compensated for their creations. But now those A.I. profits only go to one company. And no one lives in a vacuum: tech moguls raking in more and more money is going to impact more than the art world. You want another Walmart or Amazon changing the face of our society because they literally have more money than they know what to do with? Paying a company a small fee every time you don’t feel like writing an email is how you get there! There is a quantifiable, social cost of A.I. It is a shortcut that enriches the few, and offers peanuts to the majority. It is, at its core, wasteful technology. It is the selfish small business owner writ large enough to be big business, and there is no universe where this is going to “benefit the community”. A.I. cannot even pretend to be a job creator when all it does is advertise how many jobs it can eliminate.
A.I. is not a solution. A.I. is the corpse of a man in metal plating. And it takes entirely too many quarters to keep it going.
FGC #744 RoboCop
System: Today, we are only talking about RoboCop on an arcade board. There were rough approximations created for home releases, but they do not maintain the je ne sais quoi of the arcade release. Also, that je ne sais quoi is quarters. The home ports are actually playable.- Number of players: The arcade game can only contain one RoboCop. Please wait for RoboCop 2 if you want to play with a buddy.
- Uphold the Law: RoboCop is very sluggish, and moves how you would expect for a dude that is 90% covered in metal. But! He can perform a cool “hop and change direction in air and shoot” maneuver that at least feels good. Also, you may or may not be dead by the time you land. But that’s normal in RoboCop!
- Is this canon? I do not recall the specifics of the RoboCop film, but did this guy always spend so much time fighting construction equipment? I feel like I would have remembered if that was the norm for Neo Detroit.
- Take a Break: There are shooting gallery bonus stages that appear a couple of times between levels. They are shaped like Contra’s head-on sections, and they are… kinda boring? We can do better, right? This is the future of a lawless world where man becomes machine! Could we get a bonus stage where we are shooting mutant frogs or something?
- Did you know? The default high score table lists a number of characters from the movie as earning the highest scores. It includes their full names! Well… mostly. Like, “SwordMst” is probably not a real name. But that is still more than three letters, which is all a player is allowed to enter.
- Would I play again: Aside from just wanting to rant about A.I., this article is inspired by RoboCop being one of those arcade mainstays that I always said I had to revisit. And having replayed it as an adult… Um… I’m good. I don’t need to do that again.
What’s next? Random ROB has chosen… Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls! Gonna tokon for a ride! Please look forward to it!
