Fight to Protect John Connor

For an independent movie, made on a tiny budget, The Terminator was a solid success. It’s $78.3 Mil take against a tiny, $6.4. Mil budget, made is a massive hit for its size, but it also wasn’t super popular at the time it came out. With returns that small (in total), it would have come and gone for most audiences, only really finding viewers on home video and cable afterwards. A studio would still have been interested in making a sequel because, yes, that was an incredible amount of money brought in for its budget, but no one would have suspected that it’s sequel would become a mega blockbuster, helping to illustrate how sequels could be bigger and more successful than their predecessors.

Of course, part of the reason why Cameron was able to make a $90 Mil sequel against a $6.4 Mil original film is because, in the 7 years between movies, he’d become a name in blockbuster filmmaking and had the kind of clout to be able to demand the budget to do what he wanted. In return, Carloco Pictures got a $500-plus Mil mega-hit in theaters, and James Cameron’s name was cemented in cinematic history. And with the buzz building for the film, the anticipation for what Cameron was going to show audiences, everyone wanted a piece of that pie.

The first video game to come out based on Terminator 2: Judgment Day came out just after the release of Bethesda’s The Terminator game for DOS (which itself came out right around the time the sequel film hit theaters). This unrelated sequel game was developed by Dementia and published by Ocean Software, and it first arrived on the ZX Spectrum before, eventually getting ported and published on the Amiga, Atari ST, DOS, and every other gaming computer of the day you could think of. And it is, naturally, a very limited game based on the computers it was designed for.

For a ZX Spectrum game, Terminator 2: Judgment Day isn’t bad, per se, but it is limited. The ZX hardware couldn’t put out a lot of colors, with one one color plus transparency, per sprite (or, with some visual trickery, using background colors bands to shade the character), and its joystick provided limited control options. That meant that any game designed for the console had to work within its limited means. Games from other consoles could be ported to the ZX, and sometimes these would play well enough, but you did have to accept the limitations of the hardware when playing a game on the computer console. And when a game was designed for the ZX from the ground up, well then you often knew that the experience would be tuned and toned specific to this limited piece of tech.

For Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Dementia elected to build a collection of mini-games that linearly followed the plot (more or less) of the movie, which itself had been out in theaters for a month before this game hit shelves. You play as the T-800, reprogrammed and sent back in time to protect John Conner from the vicious T-1000, a new, liquid metal-based terminator on a mission to kill the young boy before he could rise up and lead the human resistance in the future. You start off grabbing and collecting the kid, fighting off the T-1000 in the mall before driving through the cemented-over L.A. river system. You escape, the T-1000’s truck blows up, and now it’s time to survive.

After heading to the hospital and saving Sarah Connor, you then repair yourself and prepare to fight off the T-1000 once more. This requires fighting the beast a second time, repairing once more, then driving down the streets of L.A. while he pursues you in a helicopter. Finally you end up at the steel mill for one more, one-on-one battle with the deadly terminator. Succeed and the future is saved. Fail and the Connors die, dooming all of humanity. You must win, you must succeed. The future is counting on you.

You can break the ZX Spectrum game up into three chunks. The first is the brawling sections where the T-800 (on the right) has to fight the T-1000 (on the left) in side-scrolling, beat-em-up stages. As a terminator, you can punch, kick, and headbutt your foes, damaging him and knocking him backwards. The battle mechanics are limited, though, and it often feels like an attack you launch fails to hit, or that you don’t have the reach to hit him before he hits you. It’s a mediocre fighting game that seems to rely more on luck than skill. It reminded me a lot of Urban Champion, the very limited NES brawling game that was far more entertaining in concept than execution.

The second style of games are the driving sections. There are two distinct driving sections, one on the canals and the other on the streets of L.A. The first is the harder of the two, with a ton of obstacles you have to dodge while everything whips at you, top-to-bottom, at high speed. I struggled here, realizing I had to basically hope I was lucky enough in my dodging to survive to one of the healing pods scattered around the stage, or I’d blow up and fail. By comparison, the driving section later in the game was far easier. All you have to do is shoot at the helicopter while dodging slow-moving cars, and once the chopper blows up, the stage is over. Easy. There’s not a lot of depth to these sections, just luck and hope.

Finally, the last set of “stages” are repair missions. These are just sliding-tile puzzles where you have to match a set of scattered parts in a grid around until they match the example presented below them. One shows you repairing the metal tendons in the T-800’s arm, while the other has you repairing his eye in the same fashion. You will note that neither of these repair points happened in the movie but were scenes from the first movie repurposed here for content. They’re not great games, as sliding-tile puzzles are pretty limited, but these also don’t require you to be perfect to finish. A timer will run out eventually, and however well you handled the puzzle, you’ll get some healing in return.

Of course, what this all really amounts to is a very slight game designed to capitalize on a blockbuster movie as fast as possible. There’s barely any content to this game because it had to be cranked out quickly once Ocean snatched up the license. Dementia did what they could under, presumably, very tight deadlines, and they cranked out a limited mini-game collection that did the job of following the plot of the film, but it didn’t exactly do anything well. It was just good enough to be recognizably a Terminator 2: Judgment Day game, but not something that anyone was actually itching to play if they realized what was actually in the box.

Ocean did just enough to be the first on the market, but they didn’t actually crank out a good game. Terminator 2: Judgment Day for the ZX Spectrum is slight, short (it can be beaten in less than seven minutes), and pretty boring. The only thing it had going for it was that it was first, but once other games based on the sequel movie came out, this one was quickly forgotten, left to rot in the detritus of the bargain bin.