Take a Ride to Tech Noir

Virgin Games produced two games based on The Terminator. The first came out for various Sega consoles in 1992 (the Genesis, Master System, and Game Gear), and all the various ports played more or less the same. The second came a year later exclusive to the Sega CD. This was another retelling of the adventure of Kyle Reese, on a mission to protect Sarah Connor from an evil Terminator sent to kill her. But while players who had seen the previous version might have thought this was just an enhanced version of that game, another port released a year later, in truth this was a different game entirely.

On its face, the confusion could be understood. This game, bearing the Virgin logo of course, was a run-and-gun platform shooter, just like the previous title. It had a similar, if expanded, set of stages to the other game (although all the level layouts were different), and it naturally told the same story (since they weren’t allowed to deviate too far from the plot of the game). If all you wanted was a game that told the story of The Terminator, well you’d already gotten that a year earlier. This expanded “remix” probably wouldn’t have hooked you. For anyone looking for some action on the Sega CD, though, this would have felt like a new title that you could play on your peripheral hardware. Whether you enjoyed it or not, though, was another matter.

Like the previous version, this Sega CD game puts you in the role of Kyle Reese, soldier of the future, as he battles his way across the wastes of future Los Angeles, battling the forces of Skynet. His mission is to get to the robot factory and destroy it, taking out as many of Skynets robotic soldiers as he can in the process. But at about the halfway point of the game, Kyle comes across the T-800, getting ready to jump into the time portal that will take him back to 1984. Kyle battles the Terminator, but in the end he has to jump into the portal to chase it, throwing himself back to the past as well.

Now in 1984 Los Angeles, Kyle has to track down Sarah and save her before the Terminator gets to her first. He tracks her across the city and into nightclub Tech Noir before battling the Terminator again. They flee, getting chased by the robot and the cops, all to end up in jail. Kyle breaks free and searches out Sarah, once more having to fight the Terminator who is there for her as well. They escape but end up at the Cyberdyne facility where, for the last time, Kyle and the T-800 fight it out all before Sarah smashes it to bits in a hydraulic press. Score one for the good guys.

Broad strokes, the games seem the same. But once you play it, you’ll see how different the Sega CD version is. For starters, the game is longer. Where the 1992 Sega title was only four stages long and you could best it in 15 minutes, this game is closer to an hour long, and it has far more stages to boot. The future section is three stages long, while the sections in the past add in a second Cyberdyne stage, upping the total to almost twice the number of stages from the previous effort. For anyone that spent full price on this title, at least when it came to stage length, this felt like a fair and complete experience.

The game also works to take advantage of the Sega CD hardware. Naturally this means there’s a more robust, CD audio soundtrack for the game. Some of the tracks are really good, like the early stages in the future and even the synth track in Tech Noir. Some choices are more questionable, including the upbeat and perky track in the jail sequence where the Terminator is chasing you and you’re on a desperate hunt for Sarah. This song was the wrong choice in context.

The CD hardware also meant the dev put in actual full-motion cut scenes from the movie into the game. This is a nice idea but, as anyone that has played any game with FMV on the Sega CD can attest, the hardware wasn’t really up for this. Sure, it can play movie clips, but it does so rendered through the Genesis’s basic, 16-bit hardware, and that leaves the clips feeling grainy, pixelated, and not very nice to look at. It honestly would have been better to reconstruct these in sprites, like they did for the 1992 game, but then they wouldn’t have been able to boast that they had FMV in the game on the box, which I’m sure is what Virgin really wanted.

In fairness to the game, it does look fantastic when you’re actually playing it. The sprites for the stages and characters are richly detailed, and the animation is fluid. In motion, the game just looks stunning for a 16-bit platformer. You don’t ever question that you’re playing a game starring these characters, set in this world, because it just looks so damn good. When it comes to art style, I have no complaints for this game as it nicely shows off just how good games could look on Sega’s hardware.

However, the execution of the game does leave a bit to be desired. Firstly, I hate the actual construction of the stages. As I’ve complained about many times before in a number of my retro game reviews, designers in the mid-1990s fell in love with “giant maze-type platform levels” for their games. These types of levels were easy to design because you could just make a big, sprawling rectangle, put platforms everywhere, and let the players try to figure out how to navigate it. These kinds of stages stretched out the game because they left the players wandering around, confused about where to go next, but they weren’t good from a player satisfaction or game enjoyment perspective. Every stage in the Sega CD version of The Terminator is like this, and it never got better.

Worse, it also ruins some of the realism of the game. I can buy that a giant robot factory is going to be eight stories tall and will have winding passages through it. I can even accept that, with some construction sites spotted around, the city that Kyle walks through could be several stories tall. I struggle to accept, though, a night club that’s eight stories tall, or a police station of five stories set on top of a county jail that’s also five stories. These are unrealistic and don’t make any sense in context. It’s just padding for the sake of padding, more complex mazes to wander without any value-added fun in the process.

The game also slacks off when it comes to enemy selection. The first three stages are all populated by the same kinds of robotic enemies, which is fine. Then, on the streets of 1984, Kyle, for some reason, has to burn through waves of punk rockers and thugs. Even when he gets to the jail it’s more thugs, but no cops at all, which seemed really weird. Why are the thugs so mad at Kyle, and why don’t the cops seem to care at all. We only get another change of enemies for the Cyberdyne factory at the end, and then it’s just the same few bots over and over until the game ends. It lacks diversity for the enemies, which makes it all feel redundant.

Finally, this game is much harder than the previous adaptation. The enemies are more prevalent and placed in such a way as to do damage to you when you can’t avoid it. You have to have twitch reflexes of a speedrunning pro to be able to get through this game without losing life after life against the unfair placement of the goons. And by the end game, in the last couple of stages, the designer went all out and added in death pits below drops you can’t see, meaning you have to take leaps of faith and memorize where to go, which just ruins the experience even further.

Overall, honestly, this game isn’t great. I love the presentation and I appreciate that Virgin’s team elected to make a more complete and full gaming experience. At the same time, though, they sorely lost track of the fun, making a game that’s too repetitive, annoying, and difficult to actually be enjoyable. I want to like the Sega CD version of the game but, in its own way, it falls just as flat as the previous versions we saw.