Terminator 2: Judgment Day (arcade game)

The story of the game falls in line with the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day: to save the leader of the Human Resistance, John Connor, and his mother Sarah from the T-1000, a mimetic poly-alloy Terminator, bent on killing them both.

The player takes the role of a T-800 Terminator cyborg, already captured and reprogrammed by the human resistance, and fights alongside them against Skynet in the year 2029. Eventually, the T-800 and John Connor penetrate Skynet's headquarters and destroy the system CPU. Discovering the time displacement equipment, the T-800 is sent back through time to John's childhood, with the mission to protect him from the T-1000 that Skynet has already sent back. In the past, John, Sarah, and the T-800 launch an attack on Cyberdyne Systems in order to prevent the development and creation of Skynet. The T-1000 catches up to the group and pursues them in a police helicopter and a liquid nitrogen truck. The T-800 is able to freeze and shatter the T-1000 with the liquid nitrogen, but it quickly melts and reforms in order to continue its pursuit of John. Ultimately, the T-800 must stop the T-1000 from killing John and blast it into a vat of molten steel to destroy it.

The amount of equipment destroyed in the Cyberdyne raid determines whether or not the company's research will continue, either averting Judgment Day or allowing the possibility that it can still occur.

Running on the Williams/Midway Y-Unit arcade hardware and Midway X-Unit, the game allows one or two players to assume the role of a T-800 cyborg programmed to protect John and Sarah Connor and the resistance fighters against the Skynet offensive. Gameplay is set in a first-person perspective.

The game consists of seven stages, with the first four set during the human/machine war in 2029 and the last three during John's childhood in the 1990s.

• Cross a battlefield to reach a hideout for human refugees.
• Travel through the hideout, protecting the refugees against Terminators and other attackers.
• Fend off Terminators and hunter-killer aircraft as John drives to the main Skynet facility in a pickup truck.
• Invade the facility and destroy its main computer, after which the player's character is transported back in time.
• Destroy as much equipment in the Cyberdyne research lab as possible while employees and SWAT officers fight back. The amount of equipment destroyed determines whether Cyberdyne's research will continue and, if the player completes the game, whether Judgment Day has been averted.
• Fight off the T-1000 as it uses a police chopper and tanker truck to attack the SWAT van in which Sarah and John are escaping to a steel mill.
• Shoot holes in the tanker to douse the T-1000 in liquid nitrogen until it freezes solid; fight off mill workers as John flees through the mill; then knock the T-1000 into a vat of molten steel to destroy it before it can kill John.

If John is killed in the third, sixth, or seventh stages, the player suffers a large health penalty and must replay that stage from the beginning.

The player's primary weapon is a machine gun, which fires in fully automatic mode as long as the trigger is pulled. Pressing a button on the side fires a secondary weapon (missiles in 2029, shotgun shells in the 1990s). Gun ammunition is unlimited; however, an on-screen power gauge slowly decreases with extended firing, causing the rate of fire to slow down. The gauge refills when the gun is not in use. Other health and weapon power-ups are available throughout the game.

At the end of each stage, the player scores bonus points for the number and type of enemies destroyed and the amount of damage done, but loses points for every human casualty (first through fourth stages only).

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Patrick, and Eddie Furlong all reprised their respective roles for the making of the arcade game, appearing via digitized footage of their characters and a combination of audio clips from the film and new recorded lines. Linda Hamilton did not lend her likeness or voice as Sarah Connor in any footage of the game; she is instead played by Debbie Evans.

The demo sequence includes a parody of the Motion Picture Association of America ratings seen in movie trailers. It claims that the game has been rated "R" (for Righteous) by the fictional Motion Picture Gaming Association of America.

In-game art that appears on the U.S. version of the arcade flyer shows several details that were not present in the released game. One image shows the T-1000 appearing on the Cyberdyne Systems level, implying that the player would have to protect John and Sarah from the T-1000. Another image has John Connor trying to open the fence the player destroys at the beginning of the Skynet level, a scene where the player may have had to protect John as he crosses the battlefield. Other differences between the flyer and the released game include the omission of the credit count for a level number, a different graphic representing the players' missile count, as well as the use of commas in the players' scores. Flyer [2]

Concept art included with the special edition DVD of Terminator 2: Judgment Day shows certain enemies and areas not used in the movie, such as the "Silver Fish" snakelike enemy, the flying Orbs enemy and the time machine within Skynet.[3]

The game was converted to the 16-bit game consoles Sega Mega Drive/Genesis and SNES, along with the 8-bit Sega Master System and Nintendo Game Boy. However, the Mega Drive/Genesis and Master System versions could not do scaling due to hardware limitations, and many of the images were redrawn at different sizes. The Game Boy version got around this problem by having the enemies move from the side or top of the screen.[4] The Game Boy version also uses some music from the arcade game Narc.

The MS-DOS port of the game was very loyal to the arcade game in terms of graphics and speed. However, it was notoriously difficult to run because of the high amount of conventional memory needed to run (580K out of 640K) and would usually need either a boot disk or memory tweaking (or both) in order to load.

The game was also retitled to T2: The Arcade Game to avoid conflict with the platform game. Players could control the gun cursor with the control pad. The SNES version supported the Super Scope and the SNES Mouse in addition to the standard control pad.[5] Other lower graphical ports include the Commodore Amiga and the Sega Game Gear. In North America it was one of the few games which supported the Mega Drive/Genesis's Menacer, but on the Master System, the Light Phaser was not supported, only a joypad.

In Japan, Game Machine listed Terminator 2: Judgment Day on their February 1, 1992 issue as being the second most-successful upright arcade unit of the year.[6]

GamePro commented that the graphics in the SNES version "closely match the arcade version." They also praised the digitized voices and fun gameplay, and concluded that the game is "probably the only good excuse you have for getting a Super Scope", though they also commented that the SNES Mouse is the best control option for the game.[5] Electronic Gaming Monthly likewise rated the SNES version as a good conversion, though they complained that game was too difficult. They gave it a 6.8 out of 10.[7]

Terminator 2: Judgment Day was ranked as the 18th best arcade game of the 1990s by Complex.[8] Brad Cook of AllGame gave the arcade version three and a half stars out of five, and noted the game's difficulty.[9] Brett Alan Weiss of AllGame gave the SNES version three and a half stars and wrote, "The biggest drawback of T2: The Arcade Game is the controls. If you don't have a Super Scope (or at the very least a mouse), the game suffers quite a bit because you can't move the sight as fast or as precisely as you would like." Weiss called it "a faithfully recreated game," and wrote, "Though not quite as satisfying as the arcade version, it's about as good as you could expect from the 16-bit SNES."[10] Entertainment Weekly gave the game a D- rating.[11]

Steve Bradley of Amiga Format gave the Amiga version a 73 percent rating and called it "a faithful conversion" of the arcade version, as well as, "A fast, furious and frantic, if rather limited, shoot-em-up with a barrowload of violence chucked in for good measure."[12] CU Amiga gave the Amiga version a 90 percent rating and called it, "A pixel perfect recreation of the fantastic arcade experience." CU Amiga called its graphics "miles better than the Mega Drive conversion," and noted that it was easier than the arcade version because of its different speed levels.[13]

Stuart Campbell of Amiga Power gave the Amiga version a 57 percent rating and felt that it was an improvement from an earlier Terminator 2 video game by Ocean Software. However, Campbell wrote, "The graphics are small and shoddy, the sound is largely horrible, gameplay is repetitive and swiftly tedious, and you will more than likely finish it inside three or four goes. If you can bear the frustration of having that many goes in the first place, that is. Tangibly inferior to the Mega Drive version, and there is very little excuse for that. The repetitive gameplay is hardly the conversion's fault, but it is pretty sloppy in most other departments, and the reduced difficulty (from the Mega Drive game at least) is a major mistake."[14]

• Terminator 2: Judgment Day at the Killer List of Videogames
• T2: Judgment Day Review
• T2:The Arcade Game at MobyGames
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day at Arcade History