I’ll Be Back in Three Moves

So here’s a dirty secret of mine: I’m terrible at Chess. A lot of people say they’re bad at Chess, a game that requires a certain amount of planning and forward thinking and understanding what possible moves your opponent could make, and they can be accepted at face value. Most of us are never going to play at a high level, never going to reach the tier of Grand Champion, and that’s fair. But there’s being bad at the game and then there’s my level, where I’m just straight up awful. I’ve never won a game, never even come close. I, an adult, have lost games to six year olds that have just been introduced to the game. It doesn’t click for me and it simply never will.

That probably makes me a bad person to review most Chess simulators, and that’s fair. I’m not someone that can tell you if the computer in a Chess game is playing fairly, if the moves they’re making are good or not, at what level a Chess game is operating at. I simply don’t know those things. I can see the strategies the computer is going for, but at a certain point we hit a landslide moment where it’s winning and I’m losing and that’s just that. If you want to know if the engine running under a Chess simulator is good or not, I’m not your man.

With that said, I don’t think it matters when it comes to Terminator 2: Judgment Day - Chess Wars as this is a game so inept in its design, so idiotic in its concept, that you have to wonder how it even got off the ground. It’s pretty clear that developer IntraCorp and publisher Capstone Software somehow got their hands on a license for Terminator 2: Judgment Day, saw what Interplay did with Battle Chess, and decided, “yeah, it makes sense to combine the two.” No, it does not, and there was absolutely no way they were ever going to be able to convince anyone otherwise.

Like Battle Chess, T2: Chess Wars (which is what we’re going to call it from now on because I don’t want to keep writing out the whole title every time) is a basic Chess simulator where one player battles against the other to capture the other team’s king. Your pieces move as they would in Chess, with the standard board, captures, and… other Chess things going on. It’s all exactly as expected, just with a 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. series skin slapped on top because, for some reason, IntraCorp felt like this was a thing that was needed.

The part that feels the most like Battle Chess comes when one piece captures another. Here you’ll get a little cutscene with the two pieces fighting before the capturing piece, whatever it may be, defeats the other piece. So it could be a Skynet drone blowing up a resistance fighter, or John Conor destroying a terminator, or whatever else you can think of. The battle scenes are totally superfluous, mind you, but they’re about the only real action you’re going to get in this game because, in all other respects, it’s still just Chess.

Frankly, some very strange choices were made when adapting the license to Chess. There are some obvious design ideas that make sense. Drones and soldiers for the pawns work well, even if it’s strange to see things like resistance fighters and future tech fighting alongside teenage John Conner. Sarah Conner as a queen is logical enough, she being one of the only female characters in the whole series, and certainly the most obvious choice to be a high-tier piece. But then we get really odd choices, like having Miles Dyson appear as two knights, meaning there are two Dysons on the board. Wouldn’t a soldier on a bike, or a lieutenant, or something work better than Miles Dyson twice?

The weirdest choice, by far, is turning John Connor into a bishop. Firstly, it’s weird to see two of them on the board in general, since, you know, there’s only one in the whole series. Plus, from a “plot” standpoint, having two Johns creates a really weird paradox. The whole point of the film was that John needed to be protected. There’s only one of him, and he’s going to rise up and be the leader of the resistance. If he dies, Skynet wins. T2: Chess Wars makes the T-800 into the king, the one that moves the slowest and basically can’t defend itself, when, logically, the T-800 should be the knight, someone else expendable should be the bishop, and John should be the king, especially since if the king dies the game is over. That’s just logical.

I know, I’m trying to apply logic to a very loose use of a license, but it’s one of those things where if you’re going to have this property, and you’re going to do this project, you should commit to it properly. You should develop a story to go with, have respect for the property you’re adapting, and try to make something that actually works in the confines of that license. IntraCorp didn’t, essentially taking the property they had and making a cheap, cash-grab Chess game out of it, which wouldn’t appeal to anyone at all.

Like, I can see a version of this that actually could work and would be interesting. A series of Chess games set up to mirror various sections of the film. The T-800, maybe assisted by a few drones (because we have to give pieces the human side can use) working their way down the board to defeat a couple of Skynet bots and get past the T-1000 to grab John, a la the Mall sequence. Or a longer board with certain squares blocked out, and you have to get the T-800 and John down to the other end through the T-1000 and other bots, as if this were the L.A. chase. You could probably come up with a whole series of Chess puzzles that could work, would mirror ideas from the film, and would be far more fun than just one round of Chess with a Terminator skin over top.

But then I am overthinking this. I’m trying to make something that people might actually want to play when this game was clearly just bargain bin fodder to make a few bucks before all the buzz about the movie finally died out. The movie was still pretty big in 1993, a year after it came out, with solid home video rentals and sales. It was a big deal, and anyone and everyone wanted to be on board with Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I can’t exactly blame IntraCorp for trying to crank out something fans of the movie might buy. And hey, at least they did something different instead of another shooter or another platformer. I can give them credit for that.

But Chess? Of all things. A game about equal sides fighting a single battle for supremacy of the board. Most ways you look at it the whole concept seems silly when you apply it to the Terminator license. Credit for the effort does not translate to credit for the final product. I respect the idea, but the final game is lacking.