TERMINATOR 2:
JUDGMENT DAY
This was one of those games that I never could get
my hands a hold of when I was a kid. There was only one video
game store in my hometown and the only copy of Terminator 2 they
supposedly had must have been stolen because I never once saw it on the
shelf when I went in there. There was only one kid I can recall
that had actually even played it. It was not until a couple of
days ago, when my copy came in off of e-bay, that I was able to play it
for the first time. I was a bit surprised by it, as it wasn't
exactly what I was expecting. After having played the first
Terminator game, I was prepared for another near impossible, ugly,
uncontrollable piece of crap game.
To be fair, my very first impression of the game was
that it was way too hard. The storyline and flow of the game
follows the movie, and you begin outside a truck stop in search of
clothes, boots, a motorcycle and a weapon. You begin unarmed with
only your fists, and right away you are attacked by a gang of street
bikers with iron pipes. You would think that it would only take a
punch or two from the all powerful Terminator to knock out one of these
average joes cold, but nope. It takes six to eight punches EACH
to take out these guys (and nearly every other enemy in the
game). Also, they like to gang up on you and you can only be
actively punching one at a time, which means if there are three of them
attacking at once, two of them will be pummeling you while you batter
around the one. Terminator also loses health rather fast, which
is kind of dissapointing, and with the aforementioned gang attacking
you, if you were to remain stationary and simply keep
punching, you would be very close to dead at the end of that one
battle. The game starts you out with four lives and no continues,
but there are two extra lives and one continue that can be picked up
during the game. I think I went GAME OVER about ten times before
I figured out how to fight with his fists. With only one enemy in
your path, it is simple , keep punching and they won't get a lick
in. However, when there are multiple enemies after you, you
have to follow a fairly simple pattern of take two punches, run away a
little, two punches , run away. This will somehow mess with the
enemies AI and they won't have time to stop and hit you, as it takes a
second after they stop running before they start swinging; by
that time, you've already got your two punches in and are running
again. This will slowly but surely drop them all. Whats
nice also is the fact that in the first level there are a definite
number of enemies, thus no random enemy re spawning. This stage
works much like the Double Dragon games, whereas you kill a certain
number of enemies in an area and then are cued ( in DD by a pointing
hand, in T2 an arrow ) and can proceed to the next area. There
are four or five outside biker bar sections where you fight the biker
gang and enraged gym freaks ( thats what they look like to me anyways),
as well as jumping a few invincible bikers trying to run you
over. Then you enter the bar and have a few skirmishes with some
more bikers and gym dudes, before fighting the boss of the level,
a nine foot tall biker. He hits awfully hard, but I found that
simply jumping over him, punching him twice while he slowly turns to
face you, running , and repeating will take him down with either no
damage or only a hit or two.
The second level is pretty cool, although terribly
frustrating at first. You are on a motorcycle running from the T-1000,
who ( like in the movie ) is in control of a semi truck. You have
to dodge crates, oil slicks, and wrecked cars, and every few seconds
the semi will come close to try and smash you and you have to aim your
shotgun behind and fire away at him with the quickness until he
momentarily retreats.
That sounds pretty easy, but theres a catch: You have to fire in
the middle of the truck to slow him down, and move left and right
dodging the obstacles in your way all the while. If you get
caught by the T-1000 he will crush you against one of the side walls of
the canal and within two seconds you are dead. Another
interesting challenge to this fast paced level is the addition of
several locked gates that you have to periodically blast open and
carefully navigate through to avoid crashing into the fence and losing
a life. There are about five sections to this short level, but
unlike the other levels in the game, if you get killed at any point in
the motorcycle chase scene, you go back to the beginning of the
level. In the last section, there is an extra continue that can
be obtained if you shoot the last wrecked car you see. Shortly
after there are no more obstacles in the Terminators path, and you can
focus on easily keeping the T-1000 away until you catch up with John
Connor and end the level.
Stage three puts you in Pescadaro Mental
Institution, where your mission is to find Sarah Connor. You
start on the bottom of six floors ( Sarah is at the end of floor 6, of
course ), and you have to make your way through a series of rooms,
gathering ammo, energy, and key cards to unlock the elevator to
the next floor. Your enemies in this level are hospital guards
with clubs at first, which you have to be very careful in taking
out. During the cut scene preceding this stage, John orders
Terminator not to kill anyone, which means ducking down and shooting
every human enemy in the knees. This is very important, because
killing a human results in a loss of about a quarter of your current
health bar, as well as a major point deduction at the end of the
level. The latter penalty is usually of no importance to
most gamers, but this game has a nice points reward program which
decides what weapon you start levels three to five with. The
weapons range from a series of shotguns to the most powerful weapon,
the mini-gun, which comes in handy during the last battles with the
T-1000. Anyways, after you get to either the second or third floor of
the hospital the T-1000 begins pursuing you, and since he wastes your
ammo by simply reappearing ten to twenty seconds later, I find that its
best to sort of ignore him, meaning continue on entering the rooms,
collecting the goods, and jumping over his easily avoidable shots as he
gives chase. He leaves you alone from time to time, but upon
entering the top floor, hes on you with a vengeance. This time, unlike
before, hes really hauling ass, and there is no losing him. Once
you reach Sarah Conor, who is in the last room if I remember correctly,
the level ends. By the way, there is an extra life ( actually the
only one of two in the game ) hidden in one of the rooms in this stage.
Cyberdyne Systems is the fourth level in
T2. This one is kinda tricky, but not too terribly
hard. It is set up exactly like the mental hospital, with six
floors containing two or three rooms each with elevators joining them
in the middle. However, unlike before, you can freely move
up and down without having to find access cards. Your mission in
this level is twofold. First, there are ten barrels of explosives
that have to be found and brought to the holding tank on the sixth
floor, near the elevator. You can only hold three at one time, so
you have to make a few trips to floor six in order to continue
collecting. There are swat team and security guards to battle in
this level, but if you already have the mini gun, I find its easier and
more life conserving to not even bother with killing them and run
through the halls and rooms jumping over their bullets. As
before, if you do shoot at them , you have to make sure to pop them in
the knees or take that dreaded life hit. Also, there are a few
indestructible laser shooting turrets mounted in some locations in the
ceiling that will shoot at you. Once you have collected the last
barrel and brought it to the holding tank on floor six, you then have
to use the "follow the pointing blinking arrow" and when the arrow
points down, kneel to deposit a bomb, follow the arrow to the next
spot, wait for the down arrow, stop, drop bomb, repeat. You can
only hold two bombs at a time here, I believe ( can't
remember exactly - maybe three ); the arrow will disappear when you are
out of bombs and you have to return to the holding tank. There is
an 80 second time limit to do this in, and although there are no more
enemies to fend off at this point, I have yet to do it without losing a
life. However, unlike the first Terminator game, you start back
where you left off in T2, meaning if you run out of time and die, you
start back on floor six with a full 80 second timer and whatever bombs
you have left to place. After placing the last bomb, you simply
need to return to the elevator to complete the level.
Now, for the last level, the Steel Mill. Up to
this point, I'll have to say, this game is much easier than Terminator
for NES. However, this last level is pretty ridiculous towards
the end. You have no enemies to battle other than three shootouts
with the T-1000, but it is FULL of obstacles. Numerous lava
pits, blasting fireballs from below, dripping lava, steam and
fire shooting up and down from pipes and machines, conveyor belts, and
the infamous moving platforms are your main obstacles in this
hellacious final level. The actual battles with the T-1000 are
rather easy ( aside from the last one ). In the first two you simply
kneel down and shoot him up until he retreats. About half way
through the level, you come to a section that requires some absolutely
ridiculous 100% precise jumps to land on these moving chains and I'm
not going to lie, I cannot do it on the actual NES. It took the
assistance of an NES emulator ( which I routinely use anyways to
take the pictures for my reviews ) and thus the glorious save states to
beat this last stage. There are no words to describe how precise
these jumps have to be. I don't even understand how one of them
works at all. You will be running to the left , and come to a pit
of lava with a chain that slowly moves down to its lowest point, pauses
for two seconds, and then ascends again. Common sense would tell
you to just jump when it is on that little pause, but noooooo, try that
and you fall short and fall right into the lava. I still don't
know exactly how to time it; I just pray and jump while it is coming
down and it seems like you will do a super jump of sorts when it is at
the perfect point. There is another spot immediately after that
which is just as bad. You are on a tiny platform above the
lava, and there is a chain moving left and right in the lower left side
of the screen. However, you only see the very tip of the chain
every two seconds or so as it just barely comes onto the screen.
Couple this with the fact that it moves really fast, and you've got
another horrible suicide jump. After these two nightmares, the
other jumps are not quite as bad.
The final battle with the T-1000 is rather cheesy,
honestly. You always seem to be out of ammo when you get to him,
and that is just fine because you need to use your punches to kill
him. All you have to do is jump up and punch, he falls
down. Repeat over and over and each time he falls he gets a
little closer to the edge of the bridge. Eventually he
falls into the molten steel below and you have to hop onto one more
moving chain platform and across a pit to run to Sarah and John to
complete the game.
As far as NES endings go, this is one of the best
I've ever seen. It follows the movie to the tee, with the
terminator saying his farewells and being lowered into the steel, with
the neat animation of him going into the steel slowly and saying
"goodbye" before hes all the way down, and like the movie, it shows his
vision blank out and go black. Awesome ending. Just awesome.
The soundtrack in T2 is not spectacular, but a few
tunes are rather catchy, mainly the Pescadaro level, where there a
creepy anticipation "edge of your seat" track, which is reminiscent of
an actual riff in the blockbuster film. Its too bad these video
games made from movies didn't have many NES versions of the actual
movie musical tracks. I think this would have helped out the
games a lot. The graphics in the game are typical Nintendo,
nothing really standing out as awesome; however the cut scenes are
pretty well detailed for its time. I have to give it to the developers
at LJN, they worked hard on making a direct from the movie storyline to
go along with the illustrations. The controls are good and really
easy to get used to, and Terminator's jumps are rather easy to
steer. Hes quick to respond to commands, which is definitely nice
in a tight.
In conclusion, this game is much better than its
predecessor. Whereas The Terminator is an ugly, unresponsive,
aggravating, monotonous , rather silent piece of garbage, T2 is a
solid, well rounded side scrolling action game. Although the
final level is much too difficult due to the stupid chain jumps, the
rest of the game is actually really fun to play, and doesn't make you
want to throw down your controller in disgust. The descent graphics,
music, and sounds effects, great storyline, fun factor ( especially the
motorcycle chase once you get the hang of it ), and easy learning curve
makes this a pretty good game overall. I wouldn't say it is as
fun and entertaining as Contra, but its fully detailed storyline and
awesome ending makes up for its lack of combat prowess.
PROS: Easy learning curve
Responsive Controls
Descent
Music and SFX
One VERY important continue is available in the game
Great
Storyline
Excellent Ending
CONS: Terminator is very weak to damage, meaning running is the
best option in most cases
Difficulty in last level is way too freaking hard.
T-1000 is rather dissapointing as he is pretty damn dumb, and easily
taken out.
DIFFICULTY
Levels 1-4: Easy to Average Level 5:
Very Hard
GRAPHICS
7
SOUND
7
GAMEPLAY 8
FUN
7
OVERALL
7
GOOD OVERALL SIDE SCROLLER
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