Terminator 2: Judgment Day

"Some interesting ideas, though poorly executed and ultimately a failure. Watch the movie instead."

Terminator 2 Judgment Day (SNES)

Introduction

Released in 1993, Terminator 2 Judgment Day was a fairly ambitious film license, programmed by Bits, and published by LJN. Baring no resemblance to the other T2 game on SNES which was ported from the arcade by Probe, which was a target shooter ala Operation Wolf.

T2 JD was an objective-based platform-er, with some driving levels. The game contains some key environments and situations from the movie, and the scenarios are mostly pretty close to the film equivalent, with obligatory video game tweaking.

If you haven't watched the movie, the story is basically as follows - Sometime in the future, a military computer system, Skynet, becomes self aware, and wants to destroy all life on earth. When this event happens, a small surviving group of resistant fighters, led by John Connor, manage to thwart the machine to save humanity. In the present time, John Connor is no more than a young boy, and a Terminator has been sent back in time to kill John Connor to ensure Skynet's success. But, John aware of the Terminator machines in the future, reprogrammes and sends a Terminator back in time to protect him.

Game-play 4/10

You play as the good Terminator, and the game begins at the Corral truck stop, one of the early scenes of the movie. In the movie, Arnold enters this scene completely in the buff, to acquire clothing, weapons and sunglasses. I guess Nintendo would have had a few problems with a streaking sprite, so he arrives in the game with his leather duds and Sunny's already on.

Anyhow, now it's time to check your objectives by hitting the start button. Your primary objective is to find John Connors address, obtain a pistol and shotgun, and your secondary objective is to destroy all future objects.

In order to get John's address, you must examine a phone booth in front of the place, but there are multiple phone booths and some keen observation or simply trial and error will determine which one. You simply push the direction pad up when standing at the booth to examine it, and if it's the right one the information will be presented to you in text form near the top of the screen in the red LCD style. Just by the way, the obtaining the address from the phone booth is more like a scene from the first Terminator movie. After completing the objective, it is not removed or crossed off from the list in the current objectives display that I mentioned earlier.

You'll soon find all the bikers at the truck stop are agitated with you for no reason, and will throw knives and shoot you with guns. You start the game with 100% power, and knives and gun shots deplete it. If your drained to 0% you will receive 50% of auxiliary power. The auxiliary power is a nice touch from the movie, however the fact that knives and gun shots hurt you is quite ludicrous, as you are meant to be unstoppable. You can attack the bikers with punch and knee attack, and two of the bikers will drop the weapons you need. Though, the bikers are endless and never stop reappearing. When you shoot the bikers it says target immobilised, non fatal wound, the enemies just disappear as for killing bad guys in any other platform-er.

I think you could have been invulnerable to standard attacks, whilst still being challenging, by having a targeting system where you must aim at non lethal parts of the body such as the legs to incapacitate, and if you kill someone or are blown up it's game over. That's just an idea anyway.

Several future objects are located at various parts of the level, and you must explore all the screens, by looking around in all the rooms and everywhere outside as well. when you find one you have to shoot the container it's in and then collect it by kneeling on it by pushing down on the directional pad. You'll then receive a message that you've retrieved a future object and how many remain. After all objectives have been completed, you will be told through the text message, and to exit the area, usually from the extreme left of right of the outside environment.

It's worth noting much of the environment is destructible, e.g. the phone booths and parked bikes outside, and they'll explode and cause you considerable damage if your to close. Inside you'll have to be careful of tables, chairs and pool tables that explode if shot.

Stats of the level are shown after completion, like hit and miss ratio, how many enemies immobilised etc and an overall efficiency percentage.

OK, next level is a driving section. This is where everything goes severely down hill. You leave the truck stop on a pinched Harley, and are pursued by the bikers. These sections are viewed from an isometric overhead bird's eye perspective. In the top right hand corner there is a compass that tells you which direction your headed.

So, after obtaining John's address, you aren't given a map of the layout of the city, where John's house is, or indications on what way to turn. You must endure frustrating trial and error to locate John's house, all the while scuffing or bumping into other vehicles will deplete your bikes energy which starts on 100%, if it goes to 0% it's game over and back to the first level.

These bits are so frustrating, it's very easy to go around in circles, and the controls stink to high heaven. Only two buttons and the directional pad are used on these parts, up and down changes you direction, left and right slides you one way or the other, one button accelerates and holding the other turn button while pushing in either direction will turn the bike in that direction, HOPEFULLY, it's not very responsive and a pain in the proverbial, all the while trucks and cars are bashing into you. It took me ages to pass this bit, mainly just from total disorientation.

I've actually played and early test version of this game, and the preliminary driving part had 360 degree turning with the D-Pad and a fast turbo accelerate as well as the standard acceleration, and it felt perfectly natural. It completely boggles the mind why they changed it in the final release.

The following level sees you at John's house and you must obtain his student Identification card so you can get a positive match when you see him later. This level can be easier if you take a moment to survey your surroundings, and have a keen eye. When your in the house, you have to locate the ID, which is randomly placed in one of the rooms. From todays point of of you, this finding a randomly placed object is quite reminiscent of searching for an item in the Hitman series of games, where the location of the item changes each time you play.

In this level you are first pursued by police, bikers again (yawn) and the T-1000, whom can shoot at you, and being a liquid metal shape-shifter can stab you at close quarters by forming a blade from his hand. You can't kill him until the final showdown at the end of the game, he is just here to bother you.

One of the following levels sees you looking for John at the Galleria. This level has police everywhere, and if you don't fire upon them they'll leave you alone. There are also many kids running around, they all look identical however, barring John Connor. When you find John, a photographic image of his face is displayed to show a positive identification. When you press start now there is a John Connor (Health 100%) follow Yes/No toggle option, and you must say Yes so that he will follow you as you lead him out of the premises through the exit at the indoor parking lot. You must stand in front of John if he is being fired upon, to protect him. After figuring out where John is located it is prudent to avoid his position to start with, and collect all the future objects first, so John isn't being attacked for extended periods. Some logical thinking is required. Should John's health be fully depleted, you can give John some of your own health by kneeling over his body. This is a fairly neat idea. Though if your efficient enough, it really isn't necessary.

The follow/stay system I felt was quite unique and original for the time. I'm not entirely sure, but I think this was only introduced into first person shooter games, with the advent of Half-Life, but it's a pretty common convention in games now. This could have been a first for a platform-er, I don't know.

Later in the game you go to collect John's mother, Sarah, from the mental institution. Here you can access a computer terminal to find out which floor she is located. This is clever interaction. Though you can also stumble onto her whereabouts by just looking around, but the option is there. If you choose to leave John at the entrance when you find Sarah, she will refuse to go with you because John isn't with you, and she doesn't know he is safe.

In this level you are pursued by hospital orderlies, and again the T-1000. To slow down the orderlies, you can shoot heaters, that will emit bursts of gas that will knock them over. The T-1000 will disguise himself as house plants and drinking fountains to take you by surprise. He can also stab you and your companions from a floor above if your not careful. Here you must protect John and Sarah on the way out.

The third to last level is at Cyberdyne, a research facility where the remains from the first Terminator are kept. You must collect these remains from the storage vault and shoot up the place to weaken the structure to finally blow it up with dynamite. you can't gain access to the vault on your own. In order to gain access to the vault you'll have to think about how it's achieved in the movie. It's pretty keen really. Oh yeah, then there's the one minute and forty seconds to escape the building with John and Sarah.
Next, it's on to the steel mill for the final confrontation with the T-1000.

I give game-play a 4 because despite major flaws, it deserves some merit for trying some new and interesting ideas in a platforming game.

Graphics 3/10

This game looks as if it could have been made ten years earlier. It doesn't take any advantage of the Super-Nes 's graphical processing power. The scale of everything is very small and finite.

Arny himself looks thin and lanky, and the sunglasses look more from the original movie. His jumps are pathetically short like a baby lamb, much like in those Robocop games from previous years. I neglected to mention jumping earlier, mainly because it's just use as a crude and stupid way a running in the game, not to access different areas or anything.

The enemies are about the same size as you and all have a very limited number of animation frames. Anyone remember that platform-er on the Speccy, Amiga and Genesis called Techno Cop?, the sprites sort of nip around the screens much like that game.

The environments have a reasonable level of detail, but are relentlessly flat, you move behind the odd object, but that's the extent of it. It feels as if your moving around a picture, there's just no sense of depth.

The locale's are recognisable from the movie, and some effort has been made with likenesses from things seen in the movie such as the motor bikes in front of the truck stop and the vat of molten steel at the mill. Background animation is limited to breakable objects I mentioned earlier. Other than that everything is completely static. All this could have been done on the NES easy minus the colour palette.

The driving bits are isometric as I mentioned before, and it all looks very static as for the platform-er stages. The city's sky scrapers, housing districts and industrial areas are all pseudo 3D. All the vehicles e.g. trucks, cars and bikes are so small they look like micro-machines. It's all so underwhelming.
The multi directional scrolling is OK, but this isn't really saying anything.

There is some small grainy images from the movie if you die, and some different ones if you finish the game. There not very impressive.

Overall, definitely nothing special here. It's competent but I think I'm even being a little generous with the 3.

Sound 2/10

The gun shot noises are unremarkable, and the lame 'ar-gh' of the enemies is the Nada. There is a weak explosion sound, and the dinky tin-ks when the cars hit each other in the driving bits, but thats about all. Not really much sound to speak of.

There is one music track that plays through the entire game, it has about three distinct beats and it's so simple and lame you'll want to have the volume turned down. I give sound a 2 for the title screen music, which is a reasonable up-beat remix of the intro music from the movie.

Conclusion 3/10

There are fifteen levels in total, eight are platforming and the other seven are the annoying driving bits woven in between. I've tried to cover some of the interesting things to note about the game, and it probably sounds like it would be reasonably fun to play. But despite some good and original ideas, the game is ultimately poorly executed, and not all that appealing from the audio-visual perspective either.

There aren't any passwords to speak of, and you have to play the game start to finish in one go. Unforgiving. The driving bits are so tedious, and there really isn't any fun in shooting the scores of bad guys, there really there just to annoy you while you search screens for objects and so forth.

This game is a real shame, as with more polish, better graphics and sound, and overall better design it could have been a real winner. As it is, it's a bunch of solid ideas stuck in a fairly lousy game. To bad. Watch the movie instead.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 08/31/06