Terminator 2 – 1991

Judgment day is here, it’s time to grab our original T2 arcade gun, converted to Blamcon, and save the future by terminating every machine smarter than a calculator as we go back in time and to review one of the most iconic light gun games of all time, Terminator 2, the arcade game.

T2, as everyone always calls it, was a 1991 arcade game, based on, you guessed it, Terminator 2 the movie. The game was made in tandem with the movie, I think with the success of the first movie Midway was pretty confident it would be a hit.

For its time the game had excelled graphics, this what we considered Photorealistic back then and it really stood out. Another cool thing is the screen was mounted flat in the cabinet with an angled mirror giving you a further view than you would have gotten if the TV was up close, I actually fixed up one of these cabs last year by combining two into one, which is where I got this extra gun.

Your gun doesn’t have bullets, it has ‘gun power’ as you shoot your power depletes until your rapid fire machine gun slows down to a slow tap drip. If you stop firing your power will slowly start to creep up, but grabbing an ammo power up instantly restores your gun power to full, so if you still have power left you may want to hold off picking it up until you need to, at least before it scrolls off the screen. It may be hard to do, but even if your screen is covered in baddies I would highly recommend you prioritize crates if your gun power is less than half, you’ll do a lot better than if your gun suddenly runs out of power and you’re basically useless until the meter refills.

In terms of powerups, you can find a lot of cool things in crates, guided missiles, fired with your secondary button, magazines which refill your gun meter, coolant which maxes out your gun power without draining for a short period, plasma that makes your gun more powerful, heather, a shield that reduces damage, or my favorite, a nuke that clears the screen and gives you a huge point bonus. It’s always worth seeing what’s in those crates no matter what’s happening.

One annoying thing I noticed in the arcades that I attributed to the gun being fixed in place is the way the cursor moves, it kind wants to move along the horizontal or vertical axis making it hard to be precise, it doesn’t ruin the experience or anything but I was surprised to see this carry over to my Blamcon conversion where I could move it around freely.

Your goal, just like in the movie, is to avoid judgment day. But unlike the movie in the first half of the game you’re fighting through the dystopian hellscape that is the skynet controlled future. You play as the T800, complete with Arnie voice quotes and battle your way through the ruined overworld, then an overrun factory, and then in a truck where you dash to Skynet’s location. This truck bit is rigged, I swear. The first few times it’s impossibly hard, make sure you grab all the missiles at the beginning. Focus on the jets and shoot them with homing missiles as fast as possible to bring them down, ignoring them is certain death. The other two bosses of the overworld, a giant tank and a set of bay doors spewing robot tanks and orbs, just best done by ignoring everything but the points you can shoot, the guns/body and head of the tank, which you fight twice, the bay doors themselves, and when you finally get to Skynet, just keep getting those crates and spray and pray.

When you do get back to the past you start at Cyberdyne. I did google this because it says ‘shoot all the equipment’ and I passed the level with some left, you get the good ending at the end of the game if you shoot every computer, cabinet, and printer? in the level, but it’s just a text line and you don’t have to.

After you escape comes the most frustrating part, for me at least. You escape in an armoured car and a helicopter comes in from all angles, if it even touches your van, you insta die and restart that part. I found, after almost putting my fist through the TV, if you keep the gun at the corner of the van and keep shooting it’s easier because you can reach all points it comes in better, that and making sure you hit it with a round from your shotgun does the trick. After you make it trough that you get rammed by a truck and you now gotta shoot that as it pops in and out. If it gets you, you gotta do that helicopter all over again.

Then you get to the endgame, the foundry, this part is very slow, you gotta poke holes in the vehicle and pour liquid nitrogen over the T2 to lower its temperature, but it’s constantly going up if you don’t, it’s always rolling around or jumping off screen so you just gotta keep at it. Make sure you get the shotgun shells, you’ll need a lot of them later. When you finally get his meter to 0, he shatters. Then it’s a race to the end, shoot those guys on the rope, it’s easy to avoid them but they drain your heath petty quick. And there you are, at the end of the game. THis is where you need your shells. When T2 spawns he will go right to kill John, if you don’t hit him hard and fast, he instantly dies.. And you go all the way back and have to do the Liquid Nitrogen part again, ugh. Every time you see him, hit him with shotgun shells, you’ll need a few hundred. He will go back and forth a few times between trying to get John and trying to get you. When you see him appear on the causeway, just nail him with everything you got. It took me a few tries of this to figure out, but while you’re doing this a grenade launcher will drop past, grab it and hit him with grenades while he’s just at the edge, and that’s it, game over. It took me 50 minutes and a dozen quarters to beat the game, even when I briefly owned it I never got to the end, I never noticed the grenade launcher and got stuck in a loop. This game, and its namesake movie, were a huge part of my life growing up and still a movie I watch every few years, so it was quite a personal achievement beating it. One admission is that I did waste one quarter at the end there ignoring the T1000 and just collecting shotgun shells, I didn’t want to get stuck without them.