Date/Time:
Terminator 2 Playthrough Video
Screenshots
♦ Title: Terminator 2 Judgment Day
♦ Publisher: Midway
♦ Year Published: 1991
♦ Format: Arcade
♦ Genre: Gallery Shooter
I played this game in late 1991, and it was one of the best games of its type ever produced. As for the visual effects on this game, it was first rate, and the movements of the characters was very fluid. This game was loosely based on the hit movie Terminator 2 Judgment Day which the title implies. You will play missions where you have to protect the main characters of the movie, like John Conner, and Sarah Conner.
The story of this game is just like the movie, and all the missions are sequenced in that fashion. The first few missions weren’t seen in the movie, because it was in the future. The movie focused on 1990 California in the San Fernando Valley, not the 21st century in a post apocalyptic Los Angeles. The last half of the missions are based on the movie, like Sarah Connor, John Connor, and the T-800 going to Cyberdyne to destroy the CPU that gave birth to Skynet. The truck scene, and the helicopter scene were the most difficult parts of this game. Two people can play this game, and playing with the 2nd player made it easier. Playing solo was definitely more difficult. I did finish this game playing it solo back in 1993.
This was a very advanced game at the time that it was released. I played this game a lot in 1991, 1992, and 1993. I would go to the arcade and play $5 worth of quarters to play this game every weekend. Back in the day, people would spend the weekends in the mall and the arcade. At my mall, they had an arcade called Space Station, and they had a great variety of arcade cabinets there, like Terminator 2, Operation Wolf, The Ninja Warriors, After Burner, Altered Beasts, Hard Drivin, Chase HQ, Dyna Side Arms, etc. They also had a few arcade cabinets in the movie theater in the mall as well. Gallery shooters like this game was pretty popular back in the late 1980s to the early 1990s. These games used light guns to simulate a real gun, the light has a sensor in the gun barrel, and it corresponds to the pixels on the screen to register a hit. Light guns were used on home computers, like the Atari 800, and a large number of video game consoles in the 1980s.
The Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sega Master System, the Atari 7800, and other video game consoles came with light guns. For the NES, it was called a zapper, for the SMS it was called a Light Phaser.
Light gun games were popular on a lot of platforms in the 1980s, and most of the popular light gun games originated from the arcade, like Operation Wolf by Taito, Crossbow by Exidy, Mechanized Attack by SNK, Operation Thunderbolt, Clay Pigeon, Cycle Shooting, Lethal Enforcers, etc. Light gun games did evolve with the gaming technology, and you had 3d accelerated light gun games as well, like Virtua Cop, House of the Dead, Time Crisis, Alien 3 the Gun etc. Terminator 2 was a early 1990s game, so it used bit map graphics, like Operation Wolf, Lethal Enforcers, and Mechanized Attack to name a few. Terminator 2 was ported to home video game consoles; however, the home console versions were never as good as the arcade version. This was something that was common at the time, because arcade gaming technology was always superior to the home video game console from the late 1970s up to the mid 1990s.
The game itself consisted of two submachine guns which resemble UZIs, and the guns recoiled as well. You also had a button on the left side of the gun, and that was to fire missiles. In the game, you moved from left to right, and this was common for light guns at the time. The enemies that shows up in front of you take the most hits, and the enemies that are further away take less hits. That doesn’t really make any sense, because people who are closer would receive more damage. This also happened in Mechanized Attack as well.
Terminator 2 is a pretty difficult game in that in some missions, you have only one chance to get threw, or you have to start from the beginning again. This can be very frustrating, because those missions are difficult in themselves, and you can use a lot of quarters trying to get threw such missions. Other than that, this game is very good. You can play this game on the Mame32 to get a taste of what games were like in the early 1990s.