T2: The Arcade Game

How fun is T2? It's probably the only good excuse you have for getting a Super Scope. If you love shoot-em-ups, put T2: The Arcade Game on the list of games that you gotta have. Lethal Enforcers, move over. The SNES has a date with a cyborg.

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.

All around, this is an amazing home port. I've only seen screens of the Amiga version, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is the best home version you can find. Obviously, this is a little different than tossing a few casual quarters into an arcade cabinet, so only Terminator fans need to bring this into their humble abodes. But regardless of how you feel about the film, it stays as close to its source material as its hardware can allow, and for doing so achieves the most you could ever ask from a port.

Graphics and sound are reproduced perfectly, the Terminators move smoothly and the gun FX sound real, but the gameplay fails to impress. I must admit I was looking forward to T2 - I'm a big fan of the coin-op - but I'm afraid it's not the same without the Uzi gun from the coin-op shaking all over the place! That said, this is still a worthy game if you own a Super Scope, but if you want my opinion Lethal Enforcers gets the edge, and I'd get that instead.

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.

This is a very cool Game Boy game that absolutely overwhelms the screen from start to finish. That's one of the cart's main problems, however, since the GB screen has problems handling all of the moving objects. Given this limitation, T2 does a good job of reproducing the coin-op, with plenty of targets and action.

It is a pretty good translation, with good graphics, yet the game as a whole is just a tad on the difficult side.

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.

It hits the spot just right when you have fifteen minutes of free time to unwind through some virtual mayhem - and in the end one thing that really counts is whether the game's fun or not.

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.

The problem I have with this game is that it was all so inevitable. I can't imagine a single game developer seriously thinking that a Game Gear version of the biggest arcade shooter was a good idea. That's like somebody suggesting that they should port Crysis to the Game Boy Advance. It just shouldn't have been attempted. This is a shoddily assembled product that feels like nothing more than a way to capitalize on the strength of the movie (and, to a lesser extent, the arcade game). T2: The Arcade Game should not be played by anybody, it is an awful mess that is about as unnecessary as it gets.

You are armed with a machine gun, a shotgun, and a rocket launcher, and your objective is to blow away everything that shows up on screen. But since, for the most part, you're slaughtering androids, the bloodshed hasn't caused an uproar from adults.

The control pad is terribly clumsy and inexact, so I opted for the mouse instead. Actually, I was able to control the cursor fairly well, but the sorry gameplay made the whole experience feel like a pointless exercise. The first stage is excruciatingly long as you mow down endless waves of terminators loafing around on a post-apocalyptic battlefield. Human reinforcements are always in the way, and they "yelp" pathetically when you accidentally shoot them. The stages are very uneven both in terms of length and difficulty, and a few feature "golden" terminators that look more like a bunch of C3POs! In one unintentionally hilarious stage, they run like chickens alongside a moving truck. Even Arnold doesn't look like himself, leading me to believe a less-beefy, digitized imposter was used instead. The explosions are awfully weak, with hulking vessels that shatter like glass when hit. T2 The Arcade Game was clearly just a weak attempt to cash in on the success of the film.