What a piece of fucking dog shit!
Making a game based off the first Terminator movie had a lot of potential.
The movie was like film noir, action, science-fiction and time-travel all thrown together into a blender.
But the game was like taking that same blender to put cat piss, horse dump and pig vomit.
Yeah, now that's a shake you don't want. So if you played this game, you're probably traumatized.
But don't worry, because now is the time to purge those inner demons,
because the battle for the past is gonna be fought in the present, right here, right now.
Man, that's too dark. Let's just start the game.
As far as the plot's concerned, you're not the Terminator, you're Kyle Reese in the future which seems like the best possible concept.
But look at the graphics. This is what you call 8-bit barf. You're jumping around on half disappeared blocks,
Q-tips, and pipes. What is this, Super Mario Bros? The backgrounds are just a random mishmash of grey bricks.
It's so depressing a look at. Am I not mistaken?
Wasn't the NES capable of a more versatile color scheme? The top bar's monochrome.
It's just black, white and green.
Look at the life meter. The black part's the amount of life you have and the green is the empty part, which is real
confusing because when I look at it, I can't help but feel it should be the other way around.
The music is unacceptable. Listen.
What do you call that? It's just a five-second loop that repeats forever!
There aren't many sound effects either,
so it really fails in the auditory department. If your ears could puke, they would!
Now you want to talk about the controls, my god is it busted! When you try to jump, first it goes into the squat.
Probably the most delayed jump I've ever seen.
The gun is even worse! When you push [A], you go into this crouching position.
Let's call it "gun mode". When you're in this "gun mode", [A] shoots and [Up] and [Down] on the D-Pad controls your aim.
So let me put this in a nutshell: You can't shoot while standing,
you can't shoot when ducking like normal, and you can't shoot when jumping!
It goes against every natural instinct you would have in a side-scrolling shooting game.
Did the game designers ever play fucking Contra? Can you imagine how much of a problem it
is that you can't shoot while you're jumping?!
But the nail that seals the fucking coffin is that there's no continues. If you die three times,
the game starts over.
Simple as that! That first level, you better get used to it because you're gonna see it a whole fucking hell of a lot.
Another big problem whenever you try to jump on something you fall through! It is an awe-inspiring
joke of legendary bad game design.
It's almost as bad as Wizard of Oz!
The hit detection is also fucked. If you try to shoot something it goes right through unless you're dead center.
This game is like a cheating spoiled rotten kid,
And you have to let it win.
For taking out these automated guns, your best bet is to use the grenades. But up till this point,
You can only find grenades in the first part in the sewers. After that, once you run out,
You're fucked. This part here
You're faced with two guns at the same time. You can only take them out one by one. So unavoidable,
You're gonna get shot by the other one. No matter how far you get there's still no continues. To my knowledge
There's no code either not even for Game Genie.
Nothing. The only way to beat it is to not fuck up at all. Which would be outrageous.
However, every time you get
50,000 points you get an extra life. So fair enough. I'm gonna sit here and shoot this fucker again and again till that happens.
The enemies respawn.
So it's not a problem to stay in one spot and just keep racking up points. The only real sacrifice
Is that you're gonna be doing this for a long time.
There we go, extra life. Now
I'm gonna be real careful because you don't want to lose all that hard work. This fucking slime here
Just got a watch out... Oh my fucking God.
The only hope you have is to spend hours and get as many extra lives as possible. You'll lose them fast
But at least you'd have enough to keep going for a while.
Who has the patience to do this?
And we're not talking emulators or save states all right?
We're talking real life sit in front of your TV holding the a button. Sounds like fun right? Yeah, well check it out
I got an idea. Get yourself a wrench or something like this here, and you just clamp it down the a button just like that
And there you go.
Just sit back, and you don't got to do a damn thing.
I'll be back.
Look at that. I have six lives already. So I'm just gonna go to bed, I'm gonna come back,
It's gonna be all maxed out. Isn't that a good idea. Well guess what, I haven't even better idea.
How about have some fucking continues? Make me have to put a wrench on a controller?
Is that what you want to do with your life? That's senseless. But that's what happens man.
Alright, I'm back.
I'm all refreshed, ready to play some more Terminator with all-new extra lives. All six of them...
Six?
Only six?!
Okay, I gotta be honest. It's only one digit. I'd expect more than nine,
But why a random number like six? That means that some fucked up masochist actually programmed it that way made a decision
"Hmm. Let's see well anything more than six. That's too much."
Fucking asshole. The only thing I can think of now is to wait till you die five times and do it again.
Then all of a sudden you're in a truck getting showered with fireballs.
There's little you can do to control the truck. So all it's gonna happen, You're just gonna die, and die, and die.
You can't hit it either, because your bullets just scatter all over the place.
Eventually you outrun the fucking thing, but next you're being shot at by some metal tank monstrosity. At this point,
You're just taken in a fucking ass.
All it's gonna happen, you're gonna get shot again, and again, and again. The next part of the game is just another death trap.
Now do you see what happened? All those extra lives? Gone. And there's still no regular enemies.
So I have no hopes of getting any more. If I die, the game's over.
But this is the most frustrating thing I've ever seen. The spears don't have any clear pattern. They just pop up at random.
So I got to get lucky. And look at these platforms. Could they be any smaller?
Realizing before how hard it is to make your mark, imagine how insane it is to land Dead center on a space
That's more narrow than the character itself. If you land on your feet,
It doesn't count. You have to land on the empty space in between your feet
Fuck! Okay, zero lives. That means I have one more chance. Jump...
jump...
jump... AUUUUUUUUUGHH!
Fuck!
GRR! Too fucking small! Too fucking small!
You're terminated!
I can't believe that shit like that could have been released on the nes as late as 1992.
December 1992. By then, Super Nintendo is out.
Speaking of which, lets check out its 16-bit counterpart.
Thankfully, it's not just a graphical enhancement of the same game. This one's entirely different.
I wonder why they recreated the title sequence from the movie, but not use the music?
Instead, it's the music from the final battle.
That's like if you use the opening Star Wars title, but use different music.
So if there's anything these games are missing right off the bat, it's the terminator theme.
Again, you're Kyle Reese. But instead of being in the sewers, you're in the battlefield just like the flashback scenes in the movie.
So we're definitely a step in the right direction.
The gunfire is way better. This time,
You can actually shoot like normal rather than going into that stupid crouching mode. You can even shoot on the ladders
which is kind of cool. But the only thing that sucks, You can't shoot straight up or toward the ground.
There's no other perfect example than the contra series.
You can shoot in any fucking direction you want and there's still challenging games.
But here, you're stuck with all these enemies that you can only hit with grenades. Once you run out of grenades,
You're fucked. If you're gonna make a game where you can't shoot the ground, don't have enemies that are on the fucking ground!
The foreground graphics always get in the way.
How is it fair when I can barely see the enemies? And what the fuck are these things anyway? Decepticon dildos?
Look, I just hit my head and died.
Surprisingly, this game is really hard.
Now I can imagine what Kyle Reese and good old Johnny see had to go through. Just running out into a Wasteland full
Maniacal machine shooter bombs and lasers out your left and right this shit shooting from the skies shit on the ground
There's shit everywhere. He'd get annihilated! Those movies are very unrealistic.
There's no way they could have survived at the time travel concept. That's okay.
Look at the bullets. They have no pattern. It's like there's a second player controller.
Before you have any time to react terminators pop out and shoot you.
It's not easy to take it slow when your character can do nothing but run.
My only strategy is to step and duck, but even then half the time, I still get hit.
I don't get to hit that often but apparently enough to die, and you actually get five lives. Once
they're gone, you guessed it. No continues, but it doesn't matter because I can't even beat the first stage.
It doesn't look that hard.
But good lord. It just goes on and on and on. Even with five lives and health Power-ups, I can't last any further.
I got to this truck part which is still part of the first stage,
But this is even worse than the truck stage in the nes
version. You can only shoot in three directions which means you can't hit this thing when it goes between.
And there's not a damn thing you can do to protect yourself. You can't move but just keep taking hits from these exploding bowling balls.
Finally it goes away, and you're back on foot. After such a long sprint you think that things may be the boss.
But no. How naïve. So you keep running this everlasting
Shitty Marathon shooting shit and getting shit shot at you. Eventually you come to the boss, right?
It's certainly big enough to be the boss, and it certainly took long enough to get this far. I'm gonna say it's the boss.
C'mon. Die. Die! Yeah, alright. That's it. What now? What? Are you fucking kidding me?
Holy mother in fucking god
Shit, holy Mackerel gosh. Damn, How is it not over yet?!
How long could this first number possibly go unless maybe the whole game is like this. I just can't fucking believe it!
So I died like anybody would. Game over, first level goes on forever, can't beat it, end a story, the game's
impossible. Real quick, let's take a look at the Terminator on Sega CD.
I already mentioned it in my sega CD review, but I have to say looking back,
This is a really great improvement over the other ones.
There are some annoying things like the other games, there's certain directions
you can't shoot. This makes it really hard to find a feasible angle to hit your enemies.
I don't know why but only Contra
it seems got it right. And sometimes it's confusing trying to figure out where to go.
It has those unwatchable cutscenes from the movie which characterized the Sega CD. Never would we dream that one day
You'd be able to watch videos in better quality on the internet.
But you can skip these scenes and aside from it, the game itself is a pretty good side scroller.
It even has the Terminator theme. As well as some great original music of its own.
God, is that fucking awesome? It's a little better than the NES version. Don't you think?
From here on out, things can only get better. The second movie was even better than the first. So, we can assume
that's the same for the games. I believe there's a light at the end of this tunnel.
We've made it through the storm, and at the end of the storm is a rainbow.
A rai... Oh no!