ST-urday #002: Terminator 2: Judgment Day
by mento
Welcome to another ST-urday, everyone. The original intent after last week was to focus on games made specifically for the Atari ST (and its Shelbyville-esque rival the Commodore Amiga , with which it shares about 95% of its library), but I've only just realized the potential for themed episodes to coincide with movie releases and/or some other sequel/reboot of a franchise old enough to have se...
Welcome to another ST-urday, everyone. The original intent after last week was to focus on games made specifically for the Atari ST (and its Shelbyville-esque rival the Commodore Amiga, with which it shares about 95% of its library), but I've only just realized the potential for themed episodes to coincide with movie releases and/or some other sequel/reboot of a franchise old enough to have seen an Atari ST adaptation. Another chance to make fun of a terrible licensed game, essentially. I swear I'll get to some better mouse-driven stuff in the weeks to come; after all, I come to praise Caesar, not to bury him. I'm sure that's how that quote goes.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
No, there's no free T-shirt with this LP.The movie in question is Terminator: Genisys. It's the newest attempt to reboot a sci-fi franchise by undoing most of its chronology, a tactic that mostly worked with the semi-recent Star Trek reboot. I haven't heard great things about this new Terminator flick, honestly, but at the very least it's given people an excuse to go back and watch the first two movies. Whether you're into the cold, brutal murder of Cameron's original, or the family funtimes of pubescent John Connor and "Uncle Bob", those two films stand as some of the greatest action sci-fi movies ever created. With movies so widely acclaimed, there's bound to be a few video game adaptations, right?
"A few" is right. If we're taking just T2 on its own, there's approximately six adaptations that were released shortly after one another. It's such a mess that I've had to carve up and move around a few of the wiki pages (as, of course, all these games share the same name as the movie), and we still don't have it completely right yet. For a quick rundown, we have: the Arcade game, which is an on-rails shooter that saw a lot of home versions; the 8-bit version for NES, Game Gear, Game Boy and Master System; the 16-bit version for Genesis and SNES; a pinball table, which I guess sort of still counts; a chess game, which... who even knows why that exists; and this version for computers, which is either 8-bit or 16-bit depending on whether we're talking about the C64 version or the Atari ST/Amiga version. While the 8-bit, 16-bit and computer versions are all similar - they involve side-scrolling brawling/shooting stages, driving stages, and they closely follow the events of the movie - they're all disparate in exactly how they're built. It's a mystery why LJN and Ocean would do such a thing, but maybe it was a case of wanting to give everyone a distinctive product in lieu of spending all that development time and money to create a single game that was actually half-decent. That falls in line with my other theory: that LJN and Ocean were never operated by humans at any point.
You might recognize this version. Or, more likely, you'll recognize that it's a bad T2 game with driving bits and shooting bits, but not necessarily the bad T2 game with driving bits and shooting bits that you remember.
Two names you can trust. Also, while I dig that we're sticking with this blue/black Terminator color scheme, it's not doing LJN's rainbow any favors.
The intro screen dramatically pans up this model of the T-800 Endoskeleton: one of the most efficient killing machines ever made, sent back in time from a future that is both doomed and inevitable. Truly, a machine built by demons from the very depths of H-
"Hey guyth? Anyone theen my juithbocth? I can't finith this Algebra homework without it."
Welcome to Terminator 2: Judgment Day! If you're wondering, Carolco is the film studio that created the movie, as well as Total Recall and the first three Rambos. They would later be bankrupted by Cutthroat Island. Some bad decisions were made.
Speaking of bad decisions, it's time to start the game. While the game doesn't look half bad, it controls like molasses on a cold day. Fun fact: though made completely of metal, the T-800 Endoskeleton weighs approximately the same as a human due to its futuristic alloys. It's meant to be an infiltration cyborg, after all. There's no reason at all for it to inch across the screen like it weighed three tons. 
This fight, if you don't recognize it, takes place in the Galleria where the two robots converge on John Connor at the Arcade. I guess the vending machine is supposed to give that away?
The way this, and each subsequent T-1000 fight, goes is that you have to outdraw the T-1000 and then run in to beat it up once the gun runs out of ammo. The T-1000 gets faster over time, and starts adding morphing abilities to his combos.
Impressively, the game has these little video clips from the movie. They've got Sega CD-level compression, and are only a couple seconds long, but it's definitely something for a game made in 1992.
This would be the bike chase scene that occurs immediately after finding John at the Galleria. You carry your health over after every level, which means that I practically start dead here.
Doesn't help that it's super hard to avoid any of the potholes and obstacles in the road. Figures the game would decide to speed up here. Anyway, I go crunch, and it's back to that initial T-1000 fight. Crunching is bad, is what I'm discovering.
I feel like the "face peels off to reveal skull underneath as a health gauge" is a concept that occurs often enough for a concept page. It was especially common in the early 90s. I remember Catacomb 3D having it.
Oh man, it's that off-model T-800 again. He sort of looks like he's in that The Lonely Island "Jizz In My Pants" video.
I finally figured out how to survive the chase level. It requires a lot of perseverance, memorization, split-second timing and looking up a level-skip cheat on the internet. One of those things more than the others, admittedly.
Next level is, naturally enough, a sliding blocks puzzle game. I know, you were wondering how this game could get worse, right? You just lacked the imagination for terrible ideas that LJN does. Look at them down there, smug in the knowledge that they make calamitous game design decisions as easily as we make breakfast cereal choices.
As timed sliding blocks puzzles go, though, this isn't too bad. You're supposed to match the image on the bottom right, and moving pieces into place just involves dragging them into place, rather than shifting other blocks around to make room. Even better, the pieces will light up once they're in the right position. It's also entirely optional: if you complete the puzzle in time, you get a bunch of points and your health is restored.
Also, as soon as you complete a line, the fingers in the hand start wiggling. It's a little off-putting, but the animation is excellent.
No problemo is right. Could've been a lot worse?
Like having to do this fight again, for instance. It's the asylum where Sarah Connor was committed, but it sure does look the same as the last place. 
Remember when I said we should be glad that the previous puzzle wasn't the usual annoying sliding block puzzle? Boom. LJN, you old dog.
Approaching CyberDyne Systems now (we wisely skipped the entirety of Mexico) with the game's sole shooting stage. Despite holding what looks like a grenade launcher, we're simply machine-gunning every police goon that shows up. They collectively represent the health meter on the bottom right. Love how that dude's just resting on the wall, like he's about to philosophize with Charlie Brown about some unfortunate aspect of growing up.
I'm going to guess this is the motorcycle leaping out of the Cyberdyne building to elude the T-1000 in the helicopter. Or it could be one of those slow-motion shots of a bullet going through a can of Coke, or maybe a Rorschach test.
We have to protect Sarah Connor in this chase level, but she's not just a damsel in distress: she's also firing on the helicopter throughout. That's her at the back of the police van.
I'd tell you how many times I shot at the helicopter, but I lost count after the first hundred. Level skip cheat to the rescue!
The game culminates in one last battle with the T-1000 at the steel mill. Arnold starts busted up, as per the movie, so it's a difficult fight regardless of how much health you have left after all those other stages. Which can't be a whole lot, if you've been playing this game properly.
With the final defeat of Gumby, we're home free. Judgment Day has been averted. Well, it's been postponed for a few years so Edward Furlong can grow up to be Nick Stahl. It's a small victory.I had originally planned on playing the Atari ST adaptation of Predator, but figured the lateral switch to T2 made more sense given the circumstances this week. Either way, it's a predictably shoddy quickie cash-in license game, but it's curious that there's so many different variations of a game based on the same movie from the same developers/publishers. It's not like they built this one to specifically play to the Atari ST's strengths, either: though it's graphically superior to the NES game (and even the eventual SNES/Genesis game, released in 1993), it doesn't the format a whole lot of justice. Maybe we'd have been better off with a port of the Arcade game; at least that could've used the mouse. To leave you off, I'll point you towards Super Best Friends Play, who recently covered the Genesis/SNES game as part of their Terminator Week. Just in case you were mistaken in thinking there was a good T2 game out there.
I'll be back.
On July 11th, I mean. With something a lot better.