Hey, he said he'd be back.
We are forging ahead with our licensed 80's movie games, but there's no way we were moving past Arnold Schwarzennegger without covering Terminator. This is the first time we are going to be covering the franchise, but it's most certainly not going to be the last. For one, there are tons of Terminator games out there across a variety of consoles and generations. But for all I talk about how much I dislike movies, Terminator and Terminator 2 are among the rare examples of films that I can watch over and over again. The second movie is particularly excellent, still one of my all time favorites to this day. I think most people are familiar with the plot by now. The year is 2029, and humanity is on its last legs, fighting off a horde of sentient machines led by a rogue AI, Chat G...err, uh, Skynet. Skynet decides the best way to finally end humanity is to send a highly advanced Terminator, the T-1000, back in time to kill resistance leader John Connor as a child. But the resistance is a step ahead, reprogramming a T-800 and sending it back to protect young John. After breaking his mother Sarah out of an asylum, they set out to defeat the T-1000 and prevent the comming judgement day. That's about as basic as I can get with the plot, it goes way deeper than that, but I think that's enough to show that it's a pretty solid choice for a video game.
Before I go any further, I wanted to quickly discuss why I skipped the game based on the first Terminator, also for the NES. Aside from the fact I just like the second movie better, I try to avoid talking about infamous games as much as I avoid talking about famous ones. Terminator for the NES is a very well known title...for all the wrong reasons. Simply put, that game is awful, it's reputation for being one of the worst games of all time is more than justified. I really, really didn't want to play it and honestly, I don't have to. The internet has already told you its an absolute abomination and this time, the internet is right. But I see significantly less vitriol targeted at the second game. It's not well loved by any means, but it's far from the absolute mess that was the first. That game may be one of my least favorite games of all time, if I had to guess it would score somewhere around a .25/10, or maybe a .5/10. Above the squirrel and moose and possibly Rise of the Robots, but worse than Celebrity Deathmatch. But what about Terminator 2. Did it break the curse and live up to the epic movie on which it is based?
Unfortunately, no it did not. All the games I've reviewed so far have been underwhelming and Terminator 2 is even more so. Rambo had interesting design, but sort of missed the point of the movie on which it's based. Predator was a little more reminiscent of the film, it was far less innovative and elected to simply slap a license on a standard platformer. But Terminator 2 failed on both counts. It was a monotonous, lazy adaptation that completely missed the point of what made the movie so great. It's a little bit better technically than the other two, but it's far less consistent and coherent and it never really knows what it wants to be. There are only six levels and each one feels like it belongs in a different game, which is never a good sign. It has uneven difficulty, is filled with frustrating and cheap traps and boasts several of the hallmarks of lousy NES games. Most notably, it was published by LJN, which if you've been paying attention to the online gaming community for the last few decades you know is a surefire sign the game is bad.
I will say there are some positives here. For one, they actually follow the movie in a clear and concise manner. Each of the six levels hit at the high points of the movie. You start with the bar, move on to the truck chase, break Sarah Conner out of the hospital, infiltrate Cyberdyne and battle the T-1000. The graphics are pretty good, the pixels are clean and crisp, the backgrounds are surprisingly detailed and the characters all look like they are supposed to. The sprite here looks much more like Arnold than the one from Predator and he's not randomly wearing pink, which is a start. The controls are functional, which should be a low bar to clear but happens far less frequently than it should. The soundtrack is alright, though I wish it had more music from the actual movie. At the very least the music that's there fits the theme and vibe of both the film and the game.
After that though, things quickly fall apart. The first level sees you entering the biker bar and tasks you with knocking out as many enemies as possible. These guys aren't too hard, but they swarm you and make it almost impossible to not take hits. You don't have a weapon, that's okay because it follows the movie, but you would think your punches would hit harder. Instead, it takes forever to punch anyone out and the game further compounds this by having guys on motorcycles attack. Fortunately, you don't have to defeat those enemies. That's good because all you can do is punch. It would be a lot more interesting if you could do things like jump kick or throw, but basically all you can do is jump and punch (and not even together). You will eventually end up inside the bar where you fight a boss. He seems to take a million hits, like he's never going to die, until you realize that he only gets hit when he swings his head back, not when he puffs his chest out. It's a frustrating fight to begin with and its made even worse by the deceptive animations that make you think you are actually land hits.
From here, the game changes again. Now you are riding the motorcycle, running from the T-1000 in the truck. Great, we are following the movie. Unfortunately, the game gives gives you no explanation of the controls or objectives after a complete gameplay shift. You have to figure it out as you go, which is a problem because you only have four lives and if you lose them all, it's game over. Even when you do, shooting the doors and safely passing through them is an absolute nightmare. The hit detection is a mess and you will lose most of your lives thinking you are going to pass through. While all of this is happening, the truck will appear at the bottom of the screen, sucking you back towards it. You have to fight it off by shooting backwards, which would be fine, except the game doesn't tell you this is possible. Oh, and you also have to dodge and shoot a bunch of stuff while you are at it. Be prepared to play this (and the first level) a lot.
If you do manage to beat that level, you will be back on foot and you will finally have a gun. Great! Unfortunately, you can only shoot people in the legs in this level, meaning you have to duck every time you want to shoot. Again, I get it, this is the part of the movie where John makes the Terminator swear he won't kill anyone, but I think this might have been a bit too much. At least you are back to something a little more fitting, but the level layout is so boring and dull, and you are so put off by the previous two levels that you just want it to end. I'm not going to go through level by level (even though at this point I'm halfway through the game) because this is the point it starts to level off. But even though the gameplay at least becomes consistent, the ridiculous tasks you have to complete all feel like they are just trying to create artificial difficulty. Cyberdyne has an awful bomb puzzle, the last level has some ludicrous jumps and all of it gets real old, real fast.
Terminator 2 was definitely a major disappointment for me, they could have done so much with this, and they just straight up blew it. I know there are other games based on the movie, the arcade shooter was pretty popular, but the NES game is just not good. I appreciate the attempts to actually follow the film, but the uneven gameplay, unbalanced difficulty and uninspired design make it hard to find much else to like. I know it's been beaten like a dead horse, but if you see that rainbow in the corner of the box, you know you are about to play something that's boring at best and horrible at worst. Unlike the previous two games, which weren't great but still worth playing as curiosities or nostalgia trips, Terminator 2 should be avoided like it's a shapeshifting, A.I. controlled death machine that's come from the future to take you out. An emphatic "hasta la vista" to this one, don't waste your time.
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