T2: The Arcade Game

As an arcade game Terminator 2: Judgment Day made a lot of sense. At its core it was nothing more than an action-packed shooting gallery, only using the movie's amazing set pieces and art direction. As a home console game the port made a lot of sense. It was a way for Nintendo and Sega to show off their brand new "gun" accessories (the Super Scope and Menacer, respectively). However, as a portable game T2: The Arcade Game makes absolutely no sense.

As you would expect, this is Acclaim's terrible Game Gear port of the Terminator 2 shooter arcade game. The basic concept is simple enough, you are a character on-rails shooting at whatever bad guys get in your way. As you play through the game you will be bombarded by new locations based on the movie, including the blown up future, a huge steel warehouse, an office building and more. With simple gameplay and non-stop action, the point of this game was to make you feel like Arnold Schwarzenegger for a few minutes.

Unfortunately that's not the feeling you get when you play T2: The Arcade Game for the Sega Game Gear. The feeling I got was that there is absolutely no reason to shrink a gun game down to a portable game system. Not only does it look and sound terrible, but it defeats the whole purpose of the original arcade game. You don't feel like a big, muscular robot. Instead you feel like a sucker who was tricked into buying a sham of a portable game.

This game suffers from all of the problems you would expect from a portable shooter. The graphics, for example, just don't cut it. The hardware doesn't allow for enough enemies to be on screen at once, so you're constantly dealing with enemies that flicker and outright disappear. All this is made even more difficult by the slugging controls and abysmal aim. The game is a chore to play, which is probably why you never hear people talking about how amazing the T2 Game Gear game was.

The problem I have with this game is that it was all so inevitable. I can't imagine a single game developer seriously thinking that a Game Gear version of the biggest arcade shooter was a good idea. That's like somebody suggesting that they should port Crysis to the Game Boy Advance. It just shouldn't have been attempted. This is a shoddily assembled product that feels like nothing more than a way to capitalize on the strength of the movie (and, to a lesser extent, the arcade game). T2: The Arcade Game should not be played by anybody, it is an awful mess that is about as unnecessary as it gets.