Terminator 2: Judgment Day

The Good
The characters are very goofy, and the story does stick to the movie pretty well.

I like the cinemas with the Terminator font and the badly digitized picture of Arnold on the bike wth a shotgun. I do recall other cinemas and stuff, but nothing distictive.

The Bad
The controls are loose, and, in typical Acclaim fashion, the jump and action buttons are reversed from the Nintendo/Konami/Capcom standards that served most NES games so well. I've also encountered this control scheme (yes, it's Acclaim's scheme to make controllers for morons) in Alien 3 and Total Recall.

The sound is laughable, with a wanna-be soundtrack that's real generic, not really thumping and tense like the movie. I do get why the movie's soundtrack wasn't used, because that would've helped (see the Genesis and SNES versions, though they don't really use the music there, either, it just works better).

Back to the characters, but these characters are really small. I mean really small. And why do all know to attack Arnold? In the movie, he walked in nude to a biker bar and demanded the clothes and bike from a thug. Yeah, he'd get beaten up. But, just to use the first level as an example, thugs already start attacking him right off the bat, and he's already got his clothes . . . okay, I can see why (make a big deal about blood in Mortal Kombat, but let a nude Arnold run around . . .) but still, the spirit is really lost.

What gets me is Acclaim hires the same developers who do those awesome Midway/Williams/Bally conversions to inferior hardware, yet can't find one studio that can develop an original game from scratch? Strange.

After playing this game for about 2 hours (after not playing since the original week I played the hell out of it as a teen), this game is forgettable.

The Bottom Line
If you're a "collector" (jump in a tar pit), then you'll need to get an original copy of this game with "Acclaim" imprinted on the back instead of Nintendo's logo.

If you want a good version of this game, avoid this, get the SNES or Genesis versions.

This game, to me, is better on the Genesis. In fact, it's so good, I'm leaving right now to play that version while the DVD plays on my HDTV.

Who knows what Acclaim was thinking . . .

P.S.: This same format of game works pretty well on Game Boy and Game Gear, however, so it's not totally bad.