Amiga

T2: The Arcade Game

What would you say if you were asked to publish a game based on a two-year old film? What if that film was Terminator 2? ‘Where do I sign?’ would be an appropriate response at this time. And that is exactly what Virgin said when offered the rights to the conversion of the coin-op classic based on Arnie’s blockbuster. Good job too, otherwise we would have missed out one of the better blasters this side of Christmas.

Nuclear fire. Three billion lives lost. A war against the machines. Well, I will go to the foot of the stairs. Los Angeles in the year 2059 is not the happiest of all places (nor is it in 1993, apparently). The survivors of the war Judgement Day (the nuclear fire) live only to fight the machines. Nasty machines not dissimilar to C3PO from Star Wars. And the folk of Los Angeles are relying on you and your mouse movements to do the business for them in this fraught and very frantic shoot-em-up.

Und wer hätte geglaubt, daß sie doch ziemlich originalgetreu ausfallen würde? Wie in der Spielhalle geht es nun also auch im Spielzimmer darum, à la „Operation Index“ sieben Levels via Fadenkreuz und Maus oder Joystick von Robotern, Killerdronen, Raketenwerfern und letztlich dem T1000 zu säubern.

Weird, isn’t it? It is no less than 27 issue (boy, does that make me feel old) since we reviewed Ocean’s Terminator 2, a dismal film licence of the old ‘lots of really crap little sub-games’ school The writer of that review, a little-known AP newie of the time called Colin Campbell, is now our very Colin The Publisher. But T2 is no ordinary licence. When Arnie promised ‘I’ll be back’, he meant it, and the title has resurfaced in a conversion of the popular Midway coin-op, a Lethal Enforcers-style shooting gallery game with scarily realistic graphics digitised from the real people in parts. That is ‘graphics which in parts of the game are digitised from real people’, not ‘graphics which are digitised from real people, who are in parts’, by the way.

T2 - The arcade game är inte speciellt fängslande. Det blir ganska enformigt i längden trots tvåspelarfunktionen.