Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Super NES, 1993)

 

It's August 29th, you know what that means.

AVGN said that "any sane human being would shut this game off after the first stage"

Welp.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (NES, 1992)

 

LJN debuts with a bang. This was featured in one of the first Nintendo Powers I ever looked at, so to this day I still have this perception of the game as being really cool. Time to completely ruin this memory.

The Terminator (Super NES, 1993)

 

What's really weird...is that this game came out AFTER T2 for the Super NES. Yeah, they went back and did the first. They had to cover all their bases and really milk Arnold. This is actually a fairly playable game mechanically. The problem is that the design can't get out of its own way, which ruins it regardless of how mechanically playable it is.

The Terminator (NES, 1992)

 

Time for me to play a loathsome, shitty game! One that I no doubt would have tried to get if I'd ever had an NES in this era, as I was pretty obsessed with Terminator movies circa 1991-1993. T2 might have been the first movie I ever saw in a theater, not sure. That was a tough act to follow.

In any case, there's a reason why in all these years I never bothered to play any of the basic NES/SNES Terminator games. At this point I've played everything else based on those two movies (Game Boy, Genesis, Robocop Vs Terminator...) so I might as well give these others a spin and see just how terrible they are. I could be playing something good, like Castlevania or Dragon Quest. Instead I'm playing this. Official Nintendo Seal of Quality my ass!

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (Game Boy Advance, 2003)

 

This is a big step up from Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance. Out of the big six Metroidvanias on GBA and DS that are Symphony-inspired, this is the one that I've always considered the best and the closest to topping Symphony.

The next one, Dawn of Sorrow, is probably also on the same level, I just dock it some points for stylus usage. I could see someone putting that one as the pinnacle of this group as well. And personally I liked Portrait of Ruin the most back when I first played all six (though I do think the Soma games have better world design). There's a lot of good stuff in these six once you get past the iffy first two games. After the next Soma game, there are two more in this Symphony-followup-hexology, and both of them have hot playable leads.

Kid Dracula (Game Boy, 1993)

 

I've got five more 'Vanias I want to cover, so here's the next one. A sort of hybrid sequel/remake of the Famicom original, except this one actually made it to the US. It's the one I've been wanting to play for a long time, since well before I knew the Famicom one even existed. Now I finally get to it. Is it everything I hoped for? Well, uh...it's certainly a game.

Castlevania Adventure: Rebirth (Wiiware, 2009)

 

This is a hidden gem in every sense of the phrase. And I mean completely hidden, because you can't even play it anymore on the actual hardware unless you already got it back in the day. It's a download-only Wii game on a service that you can't access now. Which is nuts, because it's a great game that deserves to be reborn (incidentally) in a modern compilation or something.

This is supposed to be a remake of Castlevania Adventure on the Game Boy, but it really isn't. I mean it handles the same and has the same three tiers of whip strength, but other than that it's notably different. Probably the most different-from-original remake I've ever played that still called itself a remake. At least FFVII Remake followed the same story beats. This one has six stages instead of four and most of the bosses are changed. Well, considering Castlevania Adventure is probably the worst game in the series, it really needed a Rebirth, so let's do this.