Kyle, Maybe She’s Not Worth It

The last of the console games based on the original The Terminator arrived on Super Nintendo consoles in 1993. Like the NES version, this adaptation was published by Mindscape, although this time the development was handled by Gray Matter. Somehow, though, with different developers on staff, we have yet another The Terminator game that follows the exact same beats, the exact same way, with almost no deviation whatsoever. I mean, I get it, the original film is fairly linear and there are only so many action set pieces that can be taken from the film, but you would expect at least some variance, right?

Instead, though, we get another game where Kyle Reese is the hero, he starts off in the future, he then teleports to 1984, he has to track down Sarah, he has to save her from the police station, and then he has to handle the T-800 in the Cyberdyne factory. We’ve seen this all before, three times previously, and by now, for this SNES version, it really does feel rote and uninteresting. I get that Kyle is a main character in the film. I understand that you want to include the big set pieces he sees. But maybe you can add some new ideas in. Anything to make this feel less like a rote cash grab.

At this point I really don’t need to tell you how this game plays out, as you’ve seen it all before. The SNES version of The Terminator is a run-and-gun shooter, far more in the vein of what was developed for the Sega Genesis and Sega CD than the light action platformer over on the NES. Kyle goes through four stages (the future, the present on the streets of L.A., the police headquarters, and the factory), shooting his way through enemies and avoiding hazards. He can pick up various power-ups, like health, life, and ammo, all so he can take down the goons in his way, shoot down helicopters, and eventually take on the Terminator.

There are a few small differences this time around. There are driving sections, one in the future and two in the present. The future section is a light, on rails shooter where Kyle hangs out in the back of a truck and blasts at Skynet ships as they fly overhead. The two sections in the present are presents from behind-the-back, with hazards whipping towards the car while you have to shoot at the terminator vehicle driving behind you. The key with all of these is that they all feel like half-baked ideas. The sections are all criminally short, with very little going on in them. They feel like padding, not real stages, and by the time you get settled into them they’ve already ended.

Meanwhile, the stages are. A mixed bag of linear shooting stages and wandering maze stages. As I’ve noted in my reviews of these games, I hate the wandering maze stages and much prefer something more direction and action packed. Searching the streets of L.A. for a path to the exit, or having to check every room of the police department just to find Sarah, is not my idea of a good time. These feel like underbaked stages, designed simply to waste time and add even more padding. In short, this game is very padded.

It does look better than the NES title, but then you’d kind of hope that would be the case. This is a game presented on the SNES so it should be more detailed and more colorful. It is, but only by degrees. The stages are still rather flat looking, without a lot of rich details. The tile work is repetitive and uninspired. The best part is the fact that the animation is fluid and the characters are decent. They look a dang sight better than the characters in the NES game, and you can almost pretend you’re controlling someone that looks like Kyle while a halfway okay version of a terminator endoskeleton wanders around. It’s not handsome by any means, but it is passable.

The sound mix, though, is a real disappointment. Usually I find that SNES versions of games have better soundtracks than the Genesis version. The SNES has a better soundboard, in my opinion, and can thus pump out better tunes. Here, though, Grey Matter didn’t create any tracks that were worth listening to. Music from the movie is all but absent here, and the loops of music we do get sound fine but are way too short and basic. This is a very repetitive and boring experience, even on an aural level.

It really would have been nice to get something more interesting from this game, something with some new ideas. There are plenty of sections of the movie that none of these games adapted, so I don’t know why each of these versions did the same content in the same way. I’m not saying we need to have a mini-game where Sarah waits tables (like she does in the movie), but maybe we could get her moving around the streets of L.A., running from someone she thinks is chasing her. Maybe a stage where the T-800 goes and finds the other Sarahs and kills them. Maybe Sarah could be the hero of the last stage and she could be the one to deal the death blow to the Terminator.

There is a lot that can be done in a game based on The Terminator, but despite this the only game that actually tried anything different was the title over on DOS (and it was too far ahead of its time for the hardware to keep up). It would be nice to think some developer out there, somewhere thought, “hey, we can do more,” and would have put that in. I get that licensed adaptations are usually rush-jobs so the licensing company can make money. But was there any real rush to get this SNES version out, a full year after Terminator 2: Judgment Day and 9 years after the original film was released? Considering it was the last console title based on the original movie we were going to get, it certainly could have been given the time to breathe and create something new.

Now, this wasn’t the very last game based on the original movie. There was one more, a mobile game from 2003. Trying to get mobile games to work in emulation, let alone even tracking down a playable version at all, is difficult under the best of circumstances. And, really, while you could track down a copy of any of these home console versions, there’s no way to physically find a mobile port of The Terminator at this point. It’s a curiosity lost to the sands of time. As such, this is the last version we can cover effectively and, yeah, The Terminator goes out on a sour note when it comes to consoles.

Thankfully, from everything I’ve seen, Terminator 2: Judgment Day gets a much better series of games for us to look at, and we’ll get to those soon enough. Clearly what we needed was a bigger movie with more action to get us the kinds of games we need.