Gun Toting Action

There is no doubt that Terminator 2: Judgment Day was a cultural event. While the first film was a low-budget sci-fi film that managed to crank out a respectable (for its size) Box Office, its sequel was bigger, badder, and became a Box Office juggernaut. It hauled in over $500 in theaters, sold so many VHS tapes and DVDs, and proved that the TerminatorIs it a series about a future nuclear war and the survivors of the aftermath? Is it a series of chase movies set in the present day? Is it a series about time travel? That fact is that the Terminator series is all of those concepts. The mash-up of genres and ideas shouldn't work, but the films have proven adept at mixing into a heady series unlike any other. franchise was so iconic and interesting that the various studios with control over it simply couldn’t let it go. Countless sequels to the film came and went, but few were able to get anywhere close to the awesome power of James Cameron’s sequel.

So many game studios wanted in on the Terminator action, before, during, and after the sequels release, that an absolute glut of games based on both the first film and the sequel between 1991 and 1993. We already looked at one game based on the sequel for the ZX Spectrum, a weird little mini-game collection that vaguely followed the bones of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and now we have another strange game to add to the pile as well. Midway gained the arcade rights to the film, and they pushed out a game in October of 1991 while the film was still playing in theaters and Terminator hype was raging and, well, it did a respectable job of capturing the essence of the franchise. It’s a bad adaptation of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but a pretty good Terminator game in general (if all you want is a lot of shooting).

Loosely based on the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, this arcade shooter starts you off as the reprogrammed T-800 in the future, assisting the human resistance in their battles with SkyNet and its machine army. As we’ve seen in many other games based in this franchise, that means you’re going to play shooting your way across the wasteland, taking out countless hordes of machines as you slowly work your way towards the time portal SkyNet is guarding. It’ll take a lot of bullets, and a lot of time, to get there but once you’re in the portal it’s time to go to the past and save John Connor.

Or, really, the game skips the saving part and immediately gets to the part where you’re at Cyberdyne, assisting John and Sarah in their plan to blow up the corporation and stop the war with the machines. Blow up enough equipment and the future is saved. Then you just have to deal with the T-1000, who has been chasing the Connors across the city. A race along the highway leads to the metal factory, and there it’s time for the showdown with the liquid metal terminator to save the Connors and end this war once and for all.

Gameplay in the Terminator 2: Judgment Day arcade game is pretty limited. This is a gun-based, on-rails shooter where every stage, every section, involves you shooting at the screen, blowing away countless hordes of enemies. Enemies will march in from the sides, from the back, and will pop up in front of the players, and all of them must be shot. You’ll also have to take out their projectiles, like missiles, pipe bombs, and shock blasts, if you want to prevent taking damage and losing a life.

That is actually one important thing to note: this game is a quarter muncher by design. You get one life for one credit, and while you have a long health bar, that can get drained quickly by all the enemies on screen. If you die, you have to put in another token or its game over for you and back to start. And you will die, probably a few times, as the game will be packed full of enemies, coming on from all directions and shooting at you constantly. Getting through one stage of the game without dying is impressive. Getting through the whole game on a single credit would be an absolute miracle.

With that said, there is one convenience that does make this game somewhat more manageable: you only have to protect your half of the screen. The game is designed for two play action, with each player taking one half of the screen (that their gun is mounted in front of, right or left). Enemies can be on the other side of the screen, shooting all they want, and it won’t affect your side at all. This means you really just have to focus on your batch of enemies, with only the corner of your eye tracking anything that might be moving laterally, to keep yourself alive. It’s helpful, even if one half of the screen can still get pretty packed full of danger.

I find the construction of the game curious. While it is a Terminator 2: Judgment Day game, it seems curiously disinterested in actually adapting the movie. It spends easily two thirds of its time in the future, in sections we don’t even see in the movie, lending this part of the game a feel of an elaborate fan fiction. Yes, the various adaptations of The Terminator also did this, sending Kyle Reese out into the wastes to fight his way to SkyNet and jump into the portal, but in that case Kyle at least discussed this part of his life, and there were flashbacks to his time as a freedom fighter that at least gave the game creators leeway. In the sequel, the T-800 is said to be reprogrammed and sent through the portal and that’s it. That’s all the backstory it gets. Giving him a long, future mission beforehand feels pretty weird.

But then, once the game actually gets around to the events of the movie it dismisses most of it. The first act of the film, where the Terminator shows up to battle the T-1000 at the mall, save John Connor, and ride off into the L.A. river system, is handled in a four panel cutscene in a matter of seconds. The section where John and the T-800 save Sarah, and then their ride off into Mexico to hide, before riding back is completely absent. The next section of action picks up at Cyberdyne, the very last act of the film, and everything is wrapped up in two stages. Very little of the actual movie was remade in this game at all, making it a very tangential adaptation of the film.

I will credit one really good idea in this section: the Cyberdyne level actually requires you to destroy equipment to take down the corporation. As you blast your way through the level (and, curiously, kill a whole bunch of police officers), you are given a counter of how much Cyberdyne equipment is left. Destroy enough and the future is saved. Fail and you get the bad ending where SkyNet still launches and this whole time loop starts over again. This gives you incentive to do more than just mindlessly blast enemies. It was interesting to have more of a goal to complete, and I rather liked that.

Still this game does feel limited and weirdly disengaged from the source material. Yes, the audio is decent and the graphics are solid, looking the part of an adaptation. The mindless shooting (and it is incredibly mindless) is fun for a single playthrough and you’ll have fun pumping quarters (or credits in emulation) into the game for a time. The gun controller (if you can play on real hardware) feels solid and it’s a fun way to get into the game. There’s enough good details that make this a fun Terminator game to play, at least for one sitting.

But more than that? Maybe not. It’s a pretty shallow game, long term, and it does a terrible job of actually being a Terminator 2: Judgment Day game. It’s dumb and fun for a while, but eventually it’s closed-loop, simple gameplay and lack of connection to the source makes it wear thin.