I also review NARC this week, and am pleasantly surprised by what I find:
"I don't know if I've ever had lower expectations for a game than for NARC. In addition to a last-minute shift to budget title status, the title is a remake of a truly bad arcade game, famous only for being the industry's biggest sop to the government's "Just Say No" campaign. In what they hoped would be a canny marketing move, Midway hoped to cash in on the 'any publicity is good publicity' concept by making a game where the player can do drugs. It didn't work out so well for them—there were a few protests and a little bit of a fuss made, but an increasingly media-savvy public mostly saw it for what it was, a cheap gimmick intended to create heat around an otherwise unremarkable title."
We move to the present
here.