THE TERMINATOR
So far,
my first
3 reviews have been on games I really enjoyed playing as a kid.
However, I felt compelled to do a review now on one of those other
games. The Terminator on the NES was above all the most
"cheating" game I had ever played at the time, and caused many fits on
my part, slinging the controller at the TV, punching the floor, and
even letting
out a swear word or three.
I remember picking this game out with
my parents and being so excited about getting to play it. I took
out the game in the backseat of our family car and I must have read the
instruction manual and the back of the
game box about four times before I got home. Then, once we arrived , I
had to help my parents unload the groceries. I was thinking
"Argggghhh,
I gotta play this awesome game, NOW!!!" After shuttling in the
grocery bags at record breaking speed, and bolting up the stairs to my
room, I was
glowing as i put the cartridge in my NES, powered it on, and watched as
Arnold's Terminator visage flashed onto the screen. All I could
think was
"Wow! This is so cool."
Then I hit the Start
button... It
all went downhill from there. My enthusiasm went to sheer rage
before the night was out. At that time, I was completely
determined to beat all my Nintendo games, which was about
six, and other than Duck Hunt I had beaten them all. This would
be the first of my unbeatables. I don't know what the developers
were
thinking when they made this game, but they must have been laughing
their asses off while programming it. Come to think about it,
they might as
well have had a troop of drunken monkeys design this piece of
crap. It might have turned out better.
As far as the plot of the
game
goes, it follows the movie pretty well. You play as a (blocky)
Kyle Reese, who's mission is to infiltrate the machine Skynet's
defenses and find the time displacement equipment to
travel back in time to save Sarah Connor; a Terminator has been sent
back in time to kill her and thus her unborn son, John , as well. John
is to be the leader of the human resistance in the Machine ruled
future. You must lead Kyle to the time machine, go back in time,
find Sarah, run from
the Terminator in a car chase sequence, find Sarah and escape with her
while in a ruined police station, run from the Terminator again in
another
chase sequence, and finally finish off the cyborg in a factory.
Sounds easy enough , right? Well, thats not what Mindscape had in
mind.
So, what makes this game so
hard, you
ask? Well, first of all, you start out with the life you are on
plus two additional tries. Lose them all and its Game Over for
you. Well, at least you still have a few
continues to fall back on, right? ... Nope. Even if you
make it all the way to the last level and finally lose your last life ,
thats it, you are done; back to the
very beginning for you. Whats worse, it is very easy to die in
this game. To start with, the controls are just horrible.
Kyle is slow at everything.
He is late to start running, late to stop, late to duck, punch, kick ,
shoot , and oh man does his jumping suck. Its bad enough that he
does this little slow boody
pooching "gotta do a big squat first" jump, but it is a bitch
to control his landings, which sadly is of utmost importance, since
Mindscape seemed to place a deadly
pit every ten feet with a nice array of very small and narrow platforms
above them. The platforms in the Skynet area are terribly difficult,
being less
than the width of your characters body, but to
add insult to injury, while jumping from one of these bastards to the
other, you are
hurried by multiple spikes coming up and down randomly out of them,
which don't take away much health but will knock you off the platform
you are on either to your death into a pit
below or making you perform the whole set of jumps again.
The Terminators and
Endoskeletons
you fight in the future are rather easy to kill; you simply need to
duck under them when they shoot/punch at you, and get up and shoot them
with your gun. Speaking of your gun,
controlling it can be a biatch as well. When you press the fire
button, Kyle kneels down, then you have to press the fire button again
to shoot; pressing up and
down will have you shoot up or down at an angle. This may be fine
and good, but try shooting while trying not to fall off of a conveyor
belt platform with
a pit below you. You naturally will keep holding the right/left
button to keep your guy from being pulled off the conveyor, but the way
the game is programmed, you
cannot draw your gun while doing so, thus you get a retarded Kyle
slapping his shoulder repeatedly as if his back is on fire, while the
enemy comes and pushes you off the platform anyway. There is one
section before you make your way into Skynet where you have to fight
off these annoying turrets which will gang up
on you in pairs if you get too close ( not to mention a couple of them
that are facing the wrong way - guess the developers missed that, thank
God ). Once you
kill them, you immediately go to a chase type sequence in which you
control a truck with a gun on the back and you have an aerial Hunter
Killer above shooting lasers
down on you ( 2 or 3 of which will kill you, thanks to the damage
you'll take by the turrets beforehand ). Its pattern is very easy
to master though and it
will go down quick. You simply have to hold forward and
accelerate until it fires two times (both will miss by hitting behind
you, and then slow all the way down and let him
shoot in front of you twice, then repeat.) If you do this while
pressing the fire button over and over it will explode rather quickly,
and take you to a ground
HK chase, which I have yet to not die on. It will ALWAYS kill
you, because the shooting pattern is rather random, and you will be
very low on health by the
time you engage him. One or 2 hits and you will die. Following
this you have the crazy super precise jumps to do inside Skynet to
reach the time displacement
machine. These jumps are just ridiculous, as most times you will
land the jump perfectly to your
eyes, but Kyle will simply fall straight through. Anyways , after
completing these you go to the past.
Once
in
the past, aside from the fact that you no longer have your gun and
grenades ( the later of which I never bothered to use much anyway, due
to the trouble aiming them ) , you get a sigh of relief for a little
while as you play
the alley, mall and stairwell level, while trying to find Sarah.
This area is easy, as you have non moving punks that you can jump over,
dogs that you MUST jump over (
not worth trying to fight these mugs ) and Policemen that you
occasionally must fight whereas you just need to duck under them until
they fire, punch them
three times, duck , and repeat until they are dead. Also there are very
few deadly pits here and there are plenty of hearts to help restore
your life. You can
also obtain baseballs here, which are a complete joke because your
basic fists and kicks are much better. By the way, you no longer weild
a gun for the rest of the game, EXCEPT in the two
terminator-chasing-you stages,
whereas shooting at him is supposed to slow him down
which I think is a farse.
The next
stage is one of those almost guaranteed life losers , as you are in a
car being chased by the Terminator. You
have to stay alive for thirty or so VERY LONG seconds ( each one lasts
about two real seconds I believe ) while
he rams you with his car, shoots you up, and you constantly collide
with a green car at every other four-way intersection. Once again
, I have yet to make it
through this endeavor without losing a life. Once you get the timer
down to 0 with the Terminator chasing you, you come to the granddaddy
of crappily designed NES levels
, the Police Station. This was as far as I could get as a kid.
Even though I subscribed to Nintendo Power magazine at the time, they
never offered any advice on Terminator, and this was before the
Internet, so I had no clue what to do . In the Police Station ,
everything looks the damn same. You have a bottom and top
level
police station, with several hallways and doors throughout; go in one
hallway and pop out in a completely identical looking scenario.
You are trying to find Sarah Connor, again. It wasnt until a
couple nights ago, after finding a walk through on gamefaq.com , that I
found how to beat this
bitch of a stage and I was pissed to find out that you have to find a
weird mysterious yellow box, pick it up, and carry it to one particular
pit, and then throw it in to
find that it makes a stepping stone to cross the pit and beat the
level. How the F*** are kids supposed to figure that out,
considering they every figure out how to
make it to the top floor where that one particular pit is. Sigh,
anyways, after this mess you have yet another dreaded chase scene, this
time with the Terminator on a
motorcycle chasing your car ( wasn't it a truck in the movie?? oh
well ) and this time instead of having to just deal with
the Terminator ramming you over and over
and shooting you ( yes, he hurts your car by ramming his motorcycle
into it over and over...(thats a nice bike ) this chase scene last
about 55 seconds ( x2 , once
again ) Also, once again expect to lose another life here.
After you manage to clear
the
final chase scene, you go to the final level, which is set in a
factory, and you have to have Kyle find yet another one of those
mystery yellow boxes AND find where to place it so that you can obtain
a key, then you have to backtrack back to the beginning of the level (
all the while fighting off what seem to be multiple endoskeletons from
the future- instead of
just one entity as it should have been ) and you have to, for the last
time, jump from moving platform to another to then jump to a little key
hole in the top
corner of the screen;miss and you fall to your death. After
this you go to the final sequence in which you have to lure the
terminator from the top area , down a
flight of stairs, and across a compactor without getting yourself
crushed, and the machine will follow and take a good squishing, thus
completing the game.
A crappy ending will
follow,
followed by the intro screen again, jeering at you to play again.
OK, you may have noticed that I said earlier that you begin with a
total of 3 lives. I also stated that, as far as I have seen,
that you WILL die once at each of the three chase scenes. So, how
is it possible to finish the game? Well, you get an extra life at
every 50,000 points you acquire. Just
trying to go straight through the game you will normally gain one and
maybe 2 extra lives as you progress from points. However, if you
really want a good shot at winning
this game, you have to settle for some awfully monotonous action.
Since you have a gun at the beginning of the game , the enemies can be
killed from a distance,
which is of course, much easier. Also , this means you can rack
points up easily, since once Kyle is positioned in his gun fire stance
, he stays there ready to fire
again, and the enemies in the future will just keep coming and coming
and coming, thus the points keep rising. To really be able to
beat this game, you have to
pick out a spot, preferably one spot close to the very beginning of the
game, above the lower ground, and aim your gun at the lower- right side
of the screen. Every 10
seconds an enemy will come from the right, you kill it , you get the
points, another comes, same deal...Repeat until you have enough lives
that you think you can win the
game. Keep in mind too that it takes about 5 to 10 minutes of
this to get one extra life. I can usually do it with only 3
extras, but damn, thats 150,000 points or,
roughly 150 enemies killed. This game is just too freaking hard.
( cheat spot for racking up extra lives by earning easy
points, which is to the right at the very beginning
of the game )
One thing I have not commented
on
individually yet in my reviews is how awesome a game's soundtrack and
special effects sounds are. Well, let this one be the first to
get a 1 on a scale of 1 to 10 ( 0 being dead
silence and 10 being ultra awesome ). There is no soundtrack in
this sorry game. The intro has a slight theme music to it, with
about 4 bars of music that loop
constantly, and the rest of the game uses the most basic of tracks,
being possibly the absolute worst music I've heard in a game to
date. There is
absolutely nothing catchy about it in the least. As far as sound
effects go, they are very basic,
Atari -like sounds that you will probably end up ignoring anyways,
instead turning up your favorite CD as you attempt to play this joke of
a game.
All in all, Id have to say this game
ranks up there as one of the most shameful games to every corrupt a
television screen. This was a very lazy, half ass attempt at a
game to make some quick money that the development
team knew would sell just because of the title, regardless of the
game's actual content. "Just make a game real quick based off the
movie and
slap it together and put it in the stores. F*** the kids"
Thats what I think happened to this title.
PROS: There is at least a means of , although ridiculously
monotonous, completing this game .
The plot
stuck to that of the movie, for the most part.
CONS: Poor Graphics.
Horrible Controls
Almost Non-Existent musical scores
Atari-like sound effects
Extreme Difficulty
Poor
Level Design ( also known as Police Station )
DIFFICULTY VERY HARD
GRAPHICS
4
SOUND
1
GAMEPLAY 3
FUN
2
OVERALL
3
-=SHAMEFULL GAME=-
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