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.

R.I.P. Sid

Pretty decent title screen. This image evokes a ton of nostalgia. In 4th grade or so Terminator was basically the coolest thing on Earth. Besides maybe Ninja Turtles. You know we even had a Ninja Turtles cereal? True story.

This intro cutscene hands-down has more effort put into it than the rest of the game.

I mean damn, this looks pretty accurate.

AHH! JESUS! Alright, so not all of these pictures are winners.

Our hero appears in the present day. Since you're playing as the Terminator in this game, at least you'll be tougher than Kyle was in the previous games, right?

NOPE. IT SUCKS MONKEY FUCK.

So once again you're punching away, rather than actually having a gun. The controls are pretty good, but Arnold gets annihilated pretty fast by enemies due to the super short melee range. The enemies look like the Jock Dude from the parking lot and they're all bigger than you are for some reason. Also, the game won't scroll until you defeat enough foes, so you have to slug it out.

The key here is to use a turbo controller and hold down the rapid-fire to wipe out the foes before they can do too much damage.

Man, punching your way through a truck stop, real interesting stuff here. Couldn't they start in the future like every other Terminator game? Start in the future, give the player a laser gun. THIS ISN'T ROCKET SCIENCE.

GRAAAAAAGH

Finally I die my way to the bar with the motorcycles. The checkpoints are generous, so you just have to die your way forward as much as you can.

This place has a pool table and not much else. Not much else...besides the toughest boss ever:

This big dude, who I think might be intended to be the "you forgot to say please" cigar guy. For whatever reason he towers over the Terminator.

With no actual weapons, you have to just punch it out with him and hope your turbo controller is working. Also he out-punches you and no-sells enough to completely murder your terminator regardless.

Turns out if you duck down and punch repeatedly, it'll keep him stunlocked...but won't do any damage, cause you can do it endlessly and not win. You gotta keep popping back up and hitting punch intermittently to actually get the guy to lose health, and usually you get hit back, and it's all just blind luck. Turns out the trick is to run up and punch twice, then run away. Over and over. The first punch doesn't count, it has to be two while standing in order to actually do damage. First stuns him, second makes him flail backwards and that's when he takes damage. Why does it have to be so weird about this? In a game with no boss life meters, too. So you'll think you're damaging him when you're actually not.

The next stage is that infamous level where you're zipping along on the bike way too fast. You gotta blast gates in the short time before you crash into them, and even then you have to-

...have perfect aim to not bump into the walls and die.

Oh yeah, when you run out of lives, it's back to the beginning of the game. So you can only push things forward so much.

I'm too old for this shite.

TO THE YOUTUBE

Get through that horrible Turbo Tunnel esque bike level and the terminator rescues good ol' Johnny C.

AHH! JESUS!

Too late for that, homie just punched like 30 guys to death at a truck stop.

Next stage is Pescadero Hospital, and you've got a gun now, but can't shoot anybody. Unless, of course, you duck down. Lotta innocent men walked away from T2 with ruined knees. Or didn't walk, as the case may be.

The T-1000 shows up in this level and actually chases you through it at high speed, which is pretty cool. You can put him down with shots, but he'll reconstitute within a couple seconds and resume chasing.

Next is Cyberdyne Systems, and you get a damn minigun for this one.

I remember being a kid watching the movie and wanting to know what this weapon was called. When I found out it was called "minigun" I was like "that can't be right"

This level is infamous because all you do is go around picking bombs up, putting them into garbage cans, taking them out, dropping them elsewhere.

Fifth and final level is the steel mill, where you're again unarmed and have to punch it out with the T-1000 over and over again. It's funny, the levels where guns don't really help, you've got guns. The levels where you really need guns, you're forced to punch.

There's some platforming in this level, due to all the molten steel. The controls are actually decent. Another game that's mechanically solid and fails on design.

Finally, you punch the T-1000 into the steel and win. No problemo.

He knows why we cry... because we're playing this shitty game!

No thumbs-up at the end. They had ONE JOB.

Alright, I'm gonna actually go easy on this one. Out of these four games (T1 NES, T1 SNES, T2 NES, T2 SNES) it's the best. And by best I mean it's like a 4/10 when the others are like 2/10 at best. Unfortunately, the next one might be the worst. Stay tuned.