"No wonder you don't see many arcade shooters on the Gameboy anymore."

Back around the early 90's, the smash hit movie Terminator 2 terminated the box office by creating a hardcore movie that had people quoting' 'Hasta La Vista Baby' for quite some time after the movie had come and gone. Midway then got the idea that they could create a game for the arcades that would become a smash hit, taking the idea that YOU could be a terminator helping the humans fight their way to victory by sending you back in time to save the young boy John Conner from being terminated by the machines, thus causing many confusing time travel references that would make your head explode.

The Arcade game was a smash hit, allowing two people to grab a gun-controller, and then fire the machine gun off at the screen to destroy many evil Terminator robots, and whatever else decided that you had pissed them off. The arcade game even gave you limited amounts of rockets to clear out a screen of bad guys even faster than your machine gun could.

Around 1994, some guy at Midway actually thought this game would be a good idea for the awesome portable at the time: the Gameboy. But seeing how the Gameboy has limited colors, limited sound, and many various problems, it seemed that this smash hit arcade game just was impossible to port.

Story
Based entirely off the movie, you start out as a Terminator in the future, fighting your way to Skynet in order to get back to the past year of the early 1990's to protect John Conner: the future's only hope. By the time you reach the past, you're halfway through the game. Holy crap!

I can't mention much else about the storyline for this game without spoiling the entire game, so that's pretty much it for now. Although with the difficulty of this game, you're probably better off just buying the movie.

Game Play
The game play for this game matches up to everything that the arcade version had to offer, sans the machine gun, the second player, and the continuing at the point where you died. The control pad will move the cursor around the screen, so you can point it at stuff to kill. The B button fires off your machine gun that will slowly lose its rapid fire as you continue to hold down the button, and the A button will fire a missile off to help kill stuff faster. The screen will slowly scroll to the right, which acts as if you're on a moving vehicle the entire game or something. The enemies will pop up from all corners, so you'll never get a moments rest in this game. Sometimes enemies will drop off things like Health, Rockets, or even a rapid fire gun that doesn't suffer from rapid fire deterioration! Despite these additional items, that still doesn't stop the game from giving you crappy hit detection. All you get to know that you're getting hit is a short 'chock' sound that sounds exactly like everything else in the game. If you see something that looks like machine gun fire, kill it fast or you'll die quickly. And with only 3 lives at the start of the game, you're going to need fast skills.

Graphics
The graphics pretty much just get the job done. You can tell apart a robot from a human which is nice, but everything in the background is pretty much all dark. If it wasn't for the fact that everything that you need to shoot is a nice shade of white, you probably wouldn't know what to shoot, which is a plus. Basically everything else is just a dumbed down version of the Arcade's spectacular graphics, meaning you're just getting the short end of the stick with this game's visual effects. No more Terminators popping up in your face, no more looks of pain as they get shot, and no more screams of pain as you shoot your human comrades that are there mostly for show.

Music and Sound
Besides the opening soundtrack, there is no music at all in this game. And sound effects are pretty crappy as well, seeing how all you get is the noise of your machine gun and the sound of enemies shooting you, and both sound pretty similar! They could have made the screen flash or something when you got shot, but instead they give you a sound that you can barely make out to let you know you're gettin' killed out there. I know this is a Gameboy game but still!

Replay?
If you can manage to get past the first level, more power to you. Otherwise, this game is so damn hard that you won't make it past that level without being a whiz at getting your cursor on the right part of the enemies and shooting them to death before you lose your last life. And with continues making it so you go back to the very beginning of the level, you may just want to spend the cash for this game at the arcade and play the better version of the game.

It's your cash, you decide
Seeing how most Gameboy games go for a ridiculously high price nowadays, I'd say don't spend more than the range of 1-5 dollars for this game. If you REALLY want a good version of this game, get the Genesis version, or better yet play the Arcade version the way it was meant to be played: In the arcades.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 05/10/05