CARNEVIL (ARCADE)

Was my decision to write about today's game influenced by the fact I watched Killer Klowns From Outer Space the night before? Almost certainly, but I would have gotten around to it during one Halloween season or other. By the way, if you're looking for a good Halloween film, I can recommend Killer Klowns From Outer Space. It's a lot of fun, and I guarantee you'll get the theme song stuck in your head. Enough about movies, though - I'm here to write about games, and today's game is Midway's gore-drenched, mime-packed 1998 lightgun shooter CarnEvil!

(click for larger pictures)

That'll be an evil carnival, then. The other option would be evil Spanish meat, and as the world's leading suppliers of delicious hams and chorizos I think it would be unfair to accuse the Spanish of dabbling in evil meat.

CarnEvil's intro begins with a little poetry, because even the gentler arts have a place in the Halloween season. It's not the most lyrical ode I've ever read, but at least it rhymes properly, which puts it a level above the poetry from Demonslair.
The poem tells how CarnEvil can be resurrected by finding a jester's tomb and inserting a magical token. It seems like the horror of CarnEvil should be easy enough to avoid, then. Don't go to the graveyard, don't find the jester's tomb and don't insert coins like it was, well, an arcade game. These aren't difficult tasks to not do.

Of course, there wouldn't be much of a game if some big idiot didn't come along and feed the jester some loose change, and that exactly what happens: while enjoying a night-time ride through the Greely Valley cemetery as part of Spooky Sam's Ghost Tour, our protagonist thinks to himself "hey, screw you, poem - nothing with such an obvious rhyme scheme is going to tell me what to do!" and deposits the fateful clown credit.

Horror movies are often derided for having their characters take the stupidest possible course of action upon finding themselves trapped in a haunted house or being chased by a deranged killer, but I think CarnEvil's introduction has them all beat. You had one job, you dolt: don't mess with the clown grave. I mean, that should go without saying, but you had a very specific warning about this. Now there's a needle-fanged clown's head trying to bite your face off and you have no-one to blame but yourself.

CarnEvil offers the player a choice of three stages at the start of the game, and boy do they all sound enticing. Well, maybe not "Rickety Town" because it sounds like a town where everyone suffers from a Vitamin D deficiency. Haunted House and Freak Show, though, those are gold. Clear all three stages and you can head to the Big Top for the final showdown, and I'll be starting with the Haunted House. It's on the left, so the developers clearly want me to head there first, right?

Happy Halloween, everyone! I hope this image will keep you warm through the long October nights (because you're hiding under your duvet). This is the jester from the intro, a floating head called Umlaut who introduces each stage with maniacal laughter and some Cryptkeeper-ish puns. In this instance, he tells us we're going to meet a ghoul who lost her head and I don't think he means this ghoul overreacted or lost her sense of proportion.

A zombie lurks in a graveyard, and because CarnEvil is a lightgun game in a very traditional mode all you have to do is aim and shoot. Shoot it in the head, if you can. Then shoot every other monster, phantom and circus performer you see until the game is finished. CarnEvil's gameplay is very basic, and if you've ever played an arcade lightgun game before you'll know exactly what to do. There are no gimmicks in this one besides the macabre setting, no special sniper sections or extra controls or mechanics for taking cover, just a shooting gallery of freaks. As such, this article is pretty much going to be a guided tour of CarnEvil's more grotesque sights, because I've already said almost everything there is to say about the gameplay. You can collect a few different, limited-ammo weapons and sometimes you have to not shoot a normal human girl, but that's about it and you know what? I love it. When you get as excited as I do by all this horror stuff, you don't need any fancy gameplay mechanics to have a good time.

C'mon, just look at this - I'm not even inside the haunted house yet, and I'm already shooting grim reapers that have had such a productive day harvesting the souls of the dead that they spill five or six of those souls when you kill them, souls that are now presumably condemned to a horrifying eternity of un-life. Just prior to this, a zombie attacked by throwing a human torso at me. I think it's fair to say I am fully sold on CarnEvil's charms.

Here is an innocent person. Do not shoot the innocent person. Get used to seeing this innocent person, because she appears multiple times in each stage, sometimes requiring you to save her by shooting a nearby enemy and sometimes just jumping up in front of a terrified man with a gun and making a loud noise. Amazingly, especially given that second pattern of behaviour, I managed to avoid shooting my friend here nearly one hundred percent of the time. I think it's because she stands out against the dark backgrounds.

No sooner had I stepped through the front door than I was attacked by Hambone, a hulking undead giant with a hockey mask and a chaingun for an arm. Also, Hambone is on fire. This is a shame, because I kinda wanted to give him a hug, but I'll have to settle for the usual lightgun boss fight - shoot the enemy's weak spot to interrupt their attacks before they can hurt you. In Hambone's case, that means shooting his gun-arm so he can't riddle you with bullets and then riddling him with your bullets. Does that count as irony? "Getting shot while you're trying to shoot someone" isn't in that Alanis Morissette song so it's hard to tell.

More zombies, some with knives, but I'm more interested in that painting in the background that shows a mantis-woman holding a maggot baby. I was so interested in it, in fact, that one of these zombies managed to throw a knife into my skull, but I think it was worth it. I want to know about the mantis-lady. Does she live here? Also, who's maggot baby is that? Because I don't think mantises start out as maggots, do they? Mr. and Mrs. Mantis could not conceive naturally - not after the first attempt, when Mrs. Mantis ate her partner's head - so they adopted. See, it's these little details that can really bring a game to life.
Speaking of the backgrounds and the graphics in general, CarnEvil is very much a game of its time in that regard, with nicely-detailed pre-rendered backgrounds being inhabited by rather boxy polygonal enemies. While I really do like the backgrounds, and they're packed with detail, their pre-rendered nature means there's very little interaction with the scenery. That's usually one of my favourite things about lightgun games, and I've made my love of destructible scenery clear in the past, but while more interactivity with your surroundings would have possibly improved CarnEvil I'm happy enough with what's on offer.

Hambone is back! I love how his name is listed as "Hambone - The Revenge" under his health bar this time. I look forward to CarnEvil Part VIII: Hambone Takes Manhattan.
There's no much new about this fight, except that Hambone's arm is now a gun that fires skulls. A gun that fires skulls. What a time to be alive.

The haunted mansion has a kitchen, complete with zombie cook in a chef's hat, which is pretty magical. I wonder what he's cooking? Spookhetti? Ghoulash? Hey, if that jester skull gets to make these ghastly puns then so do I.
Now that I come to review these screenshots, I notice that there's a bucket full of dismembered human parts at the bottom-left of the screen and a leg on the chopping block. I thought I'd mention it, just in case my bad food jokes made you think CarnEvil was getting a bit too light-hearted.

I feel like I'm skipping a fair few things that I could mention about this stage in the interests of keeping this article under 20,000 words, but there's no way I'd neglect to mention that after climbing onto the roof for undisclosed reasons - reasons one assumes are closely linked to our hero's well-established denseness - a haunted car nudges you off the roof and into an open grave with a comedy tombstone. As if that wasn't great enough, these two zombies shuffle over to investigate, not out of any desire to eat you but just to see what the hell is going on. They just look so confused, you can almost see the vestiges of their brains struggling with the fact that it's usually the dead ones that go in the hole. A tiny part of me felt bad about shooting their heads clean off their necks.

Here's Evil Marie, the boss of the haunted house. So, the Marie in question is Marie Antoinette, then? Okay, good. There's no explanation as to why the reanimated corpse of a French queen is here trying to kill me with an axe, and frankly I don't want an explanation. I'm just happy that this is something someone at Midway decided was be a good idea for a boss in a lightgun game. You don't get to gun down prominent figures from the French Revolution in Time Crisis, now do you?
Given the relative ease of the stage preceding the fight, I was not prepared for how difficult this battle was. The problem was that it took me quite a while to realise that Marie's weak point is her neck - I blame this partly on her ridiculous jiggling breasts. The certainly have a way of diverting the player's attention, and quicker than you can say "did they really give her boob physics?" Marie has lobbed an axe into your skull. Even when you do know her weakness there's still the challenge of actually hitting her bloody (ha!) neck as she pirouettes around in the air, but with patience and some accurate aiming you'll see her off.

I was trying to think of a way to work Marie's death by impalement on a tombstone into a Schwarzenegger-style quip, but the best I could come up with was "let them eat spike" and that's just not good enough, I have standards, you know. Oh, yeah, the spookhetti pun. No, I don't have standards.

On to Rickety Town, a fairground stage that starts with our hero hopping aboard a Christmas-themed rollercoaster where horrible little elves try to smash his head in with oversized candy canes - and if you'd ever seen me packing away the Christmas treats you'd know it takes a lot for me to describe a candy cane as "oversized". The name of the rollercoaster is the Slay Ride, naturally. I'm going to have to check my diary and see what I was up to in 1998, because I think I might have helped design CarnEvil and somehow forgotten about it.

The breakneck speed with which CarnEvil mixes up its locations continues, and soon you're fighting dinosaurs on a prehistoric teacup ride. Not people in dinosaur costumes, mind, I'm fully convinced that these are living bipedal reptiles with a hunger for human flesh. Just look at that thing's eyes, only a feeling creature would have an expression like that - a terrifying yet strangely adorable expression. It just wants to play, but sadly the only game it knows is Human Intestine Jump-Rope.

There's a food court to blast your way through, and in a wonderful touch it's staffed by surly teenage zombies. Their murderous rage is merely the destructive outward expression of the fear that they'll be working the drive-through window all their lives while their friends go off to college and live meaningful, interesting lives. In one of CarnEvil's rare moments of background interactivity, you can shoot the target up there to dunk one of the teen zombies into the deep fryer. Would you think less of me if I told you I found that really funny? You probably should.

In a game packed to the bleeding, suppurating gills with hideous monsters it takes a lot to claim the crown as number one thing you'd least like to find standing at the end of your bed upon waking from a nightmare, but I think Smilin' Bob here has a good shot at the title. He only wants to help. He wants to help you with his wrench. He wants to help you until you stop twitching and leaking. He only wants to help you rest.
Still, there's a billboard behind Bob that promises "Burritos a big as your head" so honestly I think I'll take the risk of visiting Rickety Town.

The stage began with a Christmas theme and that's how it ends, as the player takes on a decidedly un-jolly old elf called Krampus. More Old Nick than Saint Nick, the "real" Krampus is a figure from European folklore who acts as sort of a nega-Santa: while Father Christmas deals with the children who fell on the "nice" side of the list, Krampus takes care of the "naughty" ones, usually by stuffing them in a sack and carrying them away and carrying them away to his lair to do whatever it is that Krampus does to little kids. I'm going with "eat them," because that's the least horrible scenario that came to mind.
CarnEvil's Krampus differs from traditional depictions in that he's less of a hairy, goat-headed beast and more of a giant blue Santa with antlers and hands that look equally effective at disembowelment and raking leaves. There's not much to say about the battle itself because it boils down to shooting Krampus as fast as possible so his attacks don't hit you, something that's not always possible given that your basic gun can only fire a measly six shots before having to reload. I think that's my biggest gripe with CarnEvil: a larger clip for your weapon would have made things a little more enjoyable.
Anyway, you'll be able to bring down Kramups with enough concentrated fire and, let's be honest, he's pretty hard to miss. Onward to the Freak Show!

Yep, that is definitely a freak. You look up freak in the dictionary and you're gonna see a picture of this guy. I mean, I won't see his picture, because my dictionary doesn't have pictures, you big baby. So, what else have we got?

The most common freak you'll see during the first half of the stage is Flap Jack the two-headed man. Where's his other head? Dangling between his legs, legs which are actually the arms of a second torso growing directly from the bottom of the first torso. It must be a common defect in Flap Jack's family because there are plenty of him, popping up to attack and not really minding that much when they get shot. The sound goofy. Sorry, I mean they sound like Goofy. I half-expected them to shout "gawrsh!" upon dying.

At the half-way point of the stage you get to fight Eyeclops, a broadsword-swingin' demon knight who has the distinct disadvantage of a body covered in weak spots. He's got eyes in his biceps, for pity's sake. I don't think that's conducive to a successful career as a medieval warrior. Every time you flex your guns to impress the comely tavern maidens it'll feel like someone's squeezing your eyeball. I suppose it could be an advantage of the pro arm-wrestling circuit - the ability to give your opponent a death-stare no matter where they're looking might give you the psychological edge - but no, Eyeclops is sticking with guarding the entrance to the Freak Show's castle even though he's really bad at it. Eyeclops is also a Cockney, for some reason. Some websites like "ancient Greek" as the rhyming slang for "freak," which is oddly appropriate for a boss named after the Cyclops, but I think someone has made that one up in the recent past.

The inside of the castle is packed with these S&M freaks. Hey, that phrase works both ways - they're freaks who like S&M and they're real freaks about S&M in the same way that I'm a freak for side-scrolling beat-em-ups. You can tell they're really into it, because they've got enormous nails hammered into their bodies like an enthusiastic but amateurish Hellraiser remake. I don't think 50 Shades of Grey ever went that far. Did CarnEvil generate any controversy on its release? This seems like the kind of thing that would generate controversy, although admittedly the impact of this freak is lessened by the way he's got a bucket jammed on his head.

This is what I mean about the limited background interaction - that freak is standing right inside this iron maiden! If only I could shoot it closed somehow, it'd save me a few bullets if nothing else.

Oh, thank you, girl that I keep saving! My dedication to not blasting you the second you appeared on screen all those other times has really paid off.

A trip through the castle's drainage system dumps you in a mechanised area. That's aanother thing I like about CarnEvil, you're always on the move: there's no parade of goons lurching into the same single-screen backdrop in this one, our hero covers more ground than most racehorses do in a calendar year.
The machinery down here is devoted to collecting the corpses of the torture freaks and mushing them into a meaty slop that is then served up in giant bowls. But what could possibly require feeding with an endless conveyor belt of human flesh slurry? If you guessed "the boss of this stage" then yes, you are correct, and what a boss it is.

Say hello to Junior, the gargantuan mutant baby! Holy shit, that is one hell of thing to be fighting in a videogame. I have to wonder whether the developers played Zombies Ate My Neighbours, saw that game's giant baby boss and though "yeah, I like the concept, but it's just not deformed enough." Junior's head is held together by enormous staples, for chrissakes. This is fantastic.

I took cover in an oversized doll's house, but Junior responded by vomiting all over me so I guess it wasn't my smartest move ever. Don't forget, that vomit is composed entirely of ground-up freak-meat. Nothing so wholesome as strained carrots in there.
Apparently, if you go into the game's setting you can replace this boss battle with a fight against a giant teddy bear called Deaddy. This is probably to mollify arcade owners who were uncomfortable with the idea of shooting babies, although I can't imagine that ever being the case.

After many, many bullets, Junior takes so much punishment that he toddles back towards his cot. His cot is also a huge electric chair, which explains why Junior looks like one of my attempts at cooking steak in the screenshot above. Hey, look, officer, I had to shoot the baby, it was either him or me. Officer? No, please, put down the gun!

With the first three levels cleared, you can head to the Big Top and experience all the fun of the circus! And what do circuses have? Staggeringly unhealthy food loaded with e. coli? Well, yes. Animal cruelty? That too, but what I meant was clowns. The worst of all the freaks, the most hideous of all the monsters, a cavalcade of clowns will twirl and tumble from the foetid corners that they call home to murder anyone who enters their garish, greasepainted domain! Roll up, roll up, we've got teeny-tiny clowns with the mouths of sharks and the unmistakable gleam of madness in their eyes!

We've got brutish, hulking clowns that will grind your bones into the dirt of the centre ring with their knuckleduster-laden fists!

Doctor, doctor, I feel funny! Well, so do these madcap medical menaces, merry at the thought of some mirthful malpractise! They're on a mission to revive the use of "sawbones" as a synonym for doctor and it's your bones that are going to be sore! HONKHONKHONKHONNNNK!
So, yeah, clowns. Lots of clowns. There are few things as satisfying as shooting a clown. Even doing it in a videogame is good fun.

There are also mimes. The mimes don't attack, they just keep on doing their mime act, but the developers were obviously well aware of humanity's inbuilt desire to harm any mimes they see and so you're allowed to gun them down with no repercussions. There's even a machinegun power-up provided to help you get the job done more efficiently. Thanks, Midway.
By the way, my favourite thing about the mimes is that if you shoot their heads off, they chase after their severed noggins for a little while before succumbing to catastrophic blood loss.

I'm not sure I like this new Batman reboot.
After shooting your way through most of the clowns Hell has to offer, as well as a few of these bat-mites and rabid circus poodles, our hero climbs up to the high-wire because it is apparently very important to him to let you know that he is the dumbest son of a bitch to have ever lived. He does okay up there, considering he's not a trained trapeze artists (that we know of), but eventually a bat-man sneaks up on him and knocks our hero back doing to the ground.

I think this is my favourite bit in the whole of CarnEvil, which is really saying something - after landing with a thud, a clown ambulance rolls up and disgorges a paramedic team of little clowns, eager to facilitate some pre-emptive organ harvesting. We're only a few days in, and I think I've already found the defining moment of the 2014 VGJunk Halloween season.

Eventually the head villain gets tired of seeing you kill all his minions, and so the final battle is joined. This is Tökkentäkker, and he's a ringmaster, appropriately enough. I assume his name is supposed to look like "token taker," but all I need to know is where his weak-point is so I can sh- oi, get back here!

You have to fight Umlaut first, which honestly took me by surprise. I'd kinda of forgotten about the hideous little bonebox, but it's okay - he doesn't stick around for long. Umlaut's only attack is to try and bite you, which means he has to fly real close and thus present a nice big target for you to aim at. He doesn't have much of a health bar, either, so soon enough it's back to fighting Tökkentäkker.

Tökkentäkker gets to shout "skeletons, attack!" and skeletons do indeed attack. I'm in the wrong line of work. I've never really known what I wanted out out of life, but now it's clear - I want a job where I get to shout "skeletons, attack!" and it doesn't get me fired, like when I worked at that medical supply company.

More of a mini-stage than just a boss fight, dealing with Tökkentäkker involves chasing him around his airship and trying to shoot him the second you catch up to him, because he's very quick on the draw and you get little (if any) chance to knock him out of his attack animations. Skeletons aside, it's a rather underwhelming boss fight and CarnEvil's lowest ebb. Tökkentäkker is just some guy who dressed like a steampunk enthusiast. Earlier I fought a massive devil-baby. Tökkentäkker can't match up to that. It's not a bad fight, just not as engaging as the rest of the game, and thanks to his substantial health bar I was relieved when I finally finished Tökkentäkker off and he fell into the propeller of his airship, where he was unceremoniously diced into a million polygon pieces.

Oh god, someone catch that artist's mannequin, it's not wearing a parachute!

CarnEvil is over, and we're back where we began - our hero fondling a golden token he found in a tombstone. He's going to put it straight back in the slot, isn't he?

Good work, champ.
If Ghost Hunters was a gentle introduction to this year's Halloween Spooktacular, CarnEvil has turned the dial all the way up to maximum with a winning combination of extremely basic but very enjoyable lightgun action and a setting packed with gore, mutants and a thick vein of black humour. I loved it, as you can probably tell. Sadly, CarnEvil never received a home console port and it's never likely to, and it can be a bit wonky when emulated, but if you get a chance to play it I can fully endorse it. Unless you're scared of clowns, killer babies, murderous robots, ghostly French aristocrats and haunted cars, but in that case, what the hell are you doing reading VGJunk at Halloween?

Time to check in with the Halloween-O-Meter, and I've decided that CarnEvil has done enough to to earn the "coveted" ten out of ten rating! How exciting! I was dithering between awarding it nine or ten, but then I realised that the big clowns have pumpkins on their clothes. That did it. 10/10, good work everybody.

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TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY (ARCADE)

When I'm deciding what game to write about for VGJunk, sometimes I give careful consideration to a number of factors - is it a genre I've played recently, or a console I've neglected for a while, that kind of thing. Sometimes I just happen to have seen Terminator 2 recently. Thus, today's article is about Midway's 1991 arcade lightgun title Terminator 2: Judgement Day!

This article should be shorter than usual, because I don't have to explain the gameplay (it's a lightgun game, point and things and pull the trigger) or the story. Everyone's seen Terminator 2, right? I was about seven years old when the movie was released, and I still remember that it was a Big Deal, with massive amounts of promotion and breathless articles about the amazing, futuristic, computer-generated special effects that could make Mulder's future replacement on the X-Files appear to have the consistency of wallpaper paste.

Just in case you are a tiny child or have only recently escaped from a sinister cult who prohibit the watching of movies, a brief summary of the plot: robots become sentient, rise up and destroy humanity in a nuclear firestorm of global proportions. Well, most of humanity; pesky pockets of human resistance remain, somehow struggling on despite living in a landscape that looks as though it's been used as the venue for a pay-per-view fight between Godzilla and the Cloverfield Monster. The humans are lead by John Connor, and the machines' solution to his pesky habit of uniting mankind is to send a robot back in time to kill John while he's a kid in pre-nuclear-holocaust Los Angeles.
John sends his own Terminator back to protect his younger self, a sentence that makes you wonder about the wisdom of having time-travel plots in your movie if you look at it for too long. This friendly Terminator is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and that's who you'll playing as for the course of the game.

Look, there's Arnie now. He's digitised! How futuristic. I know I usually complain about digitised graphics and their tendency to make games resemble footage taken with a webcam from 1999, but it doesn't look too bad in this one. It's aged, but more gracefully than most, and it helps that the actual actors from the movie (barring Linda Hamilton) returned to provide motions for the game.

Here come the Terminators, those loveable and marketable metal death-skeletons. You're going to have to shoot them all as they follow their Space Invaders-inspired attack pattern of walking towards you and occasionally moving sideways. Your weapon is a futuristic laser blaster that doesn't require reloading but instead has a power bar that slowly refills when you let go of the trigger. Get used to not having any gun power, because there won't be many chances to let go of the trigger in this game.
As you can see, I have some human comrades to aid me in the battle against the machine menace. There were originally four of them, but one of them fell to a regrettable friendly-fire incident where I accidentally launched one of my limited-use missiles into his back. It seems that John Connor didn't quite manage to overwrite all of this Terminator unit's programming.

Sometimes a Terminator will pop up right in front of you. Its ability to sneak up on me like that really highlights the design flaw of not giving the Terminators necks that can look downwards, because this guy must have crawled along the floor to get that close without me seeing him. Let's hope Skynet never figures this out and develops Smurf-sized Terminators.
Weirdly, the closer a Terminator is to you the more damage it can take before exploding. Distant units can be picked off with a single shot, but once they get into your personal space your deadly laser blasts become little more than a mild irritant. They even look irritated when you shoot them in the face. Did you ever shoot your parents with a water pistol? Yeah, they look kinda like that, which is impressive considering they only have one facial expression and that's the cold and implacable visage of death itself.

Hey look, golden Terminators. I have no idea what sets them apart from normal Terminators beyond the obvious quality of their goldenness. Maybe they've just returned from a mission eliminating human resistance in Hawaii and they've still got their tans. Well, whatever their deal is I say bring it on - the more enemies on the screen, the more chance I have of hitting something when I fire.

I retract my previous statement. Things have quickly escalated beyond my ability to handle them, what with the addition of missile batteries and flying machines. Matters are not helped by the message informing me that I've picked up a guided missile. The missile itself is great, it's the reminder that I've just collected it that's the problem, because it covers half the bloody screen.
Anyway, missiles. I was struggling early on because I didn't actually check how many of them I had. A more powerful special weapon is a common feature in these kinds of games, but you usually only have three or so to work with. Not so in Terminator 2, where I have managed to accrue 95 of them. That means I could use them with greater abandon than usual. Things calmed down considerably once I'd launched thirty or forty high-explosive rounds into the Terminator hordes.

Until I reached the boss, that is. It's a Hunter-Killer, and it can take more punishment than a dominatrix's client list while pumping out missile after missile after missile. There's no trick to defeating it: certain parts of it, like the missile launchers, will flash when shot, letting you know that you can destroy them. Shoot them for long enough and they'll explode. Explode all the explodable bits and the entire boss will explode. Explode is one of those words that starts to look really weird if you look at it for too long.

67% accuracy represents a significant increase on my usual level of lightgun-game marksmanship. I told you having all those Terminators on-screen at once would pay off. Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice even congratulates whichever player performed best during the stage. One of the benefits of playing alone is that Arnie is always congratulating me. That is possibly the only benefit.

In stage two, Skynet has uncovered the location of the human base and has sent an army of Infiltrators - human-looking Terminators with a crispy Schwarzenegger-flavoured outer shell - to, um, infiltrate it. They do this by walking in through the front door and shooting anything that moves, which is infiltration in the same way that me singing Dio songs in the shower is opera.

You can shoot the skin off the infiltrator units to reveal the endoskeleton beneath. Just enough of me remains untainted by cynicism that I can say it's really cool.

Given that I'm writing this a few days before Christmas, it seems appropriate that for the second half of the stage you'll mostly be shooting at these floating bauble drones. Hatching into robotic life from those blue vending machine capsules you can see in the background, their main mission objective seem to be to fly in front of your crosshairs in order to stop you shooting the more threatening targets. At least I think the Terminators are more of a threat, because one of this game's flaws is that it's really hard to tell when you're taking damage without constantly looking at your energy bar, something that's not really feasible when a million soulless killing machines are trying to put their robo-feet up your backside. There's no screen-shaking, no flash of red, no cracked glass effect to show that you've been hurt, so you can't associate losing health with the attack that caused it and thus the game almost feels as though it's on a timer as your health is constantly chipped away.

Okay, that's a simple enough objective. Stop Skynet. Or stop the Terminator that went back in time. Or possible both of them. Yeah, that's it. Stop the Terminator and Skynet to ensure the survival of young John Connor.

I found old John Connor, does that count for anything? He's going to take me to the Skynet time travel facility so I can go back to the Nineties and protect him, but for now he can protect me. After all, he's the world's finest military mind and an unparalleled guerilla fighter, right?

Aww, crap. As soon as things started heating up John Connor ditches you, leaving you to fend off the advances of these deadly yet surprisingly festive missiles yourself. Stopping a missile by shooting it even though it's practically rubbing up against my eyeballs doesn't seem as ludicrous is it usually does in this kind of game, so score one for the Terminator, I guess?

John reappears, and now he's got a ride. You mission is to protect the pickup truck from harm, because if it takes too much damage it explodes, killing the one hope for the survival of the human race and forcing you to start the stage again. Because this is a Terminator game, you can put your unlimited retries down to the magic of time-travel. The truck is on fire, which implies that I'm not doing a great job, but this screenshot was taken towards the end of the stage so things aren't as bad as they seem. They key to success is making sure you use your missiles to blow up the flying Hunter-Killers as soon as they appear on screen. The golden Terminators are less of a threat, perhaps because most of their CPU power is dedicated to running alongside the truck. I don't have a truck either, so I must also be running alongside the truck. I have to question John Connor's tactical acumen if he didn't put the superhumanly-accurate killing machine in charge of that big gun on the back of the truck. Seems like a no-brainer, that one.

If you manage to keep John alive, you'll eventually reach Skynet's main base / Terminator factory / time-travel research centre. Halfway through stage three already, and we haven't even arrived at the plot of the movie yet.
As well as the all the Terminators and orbs you've fought before, this area introduces the snakelike "Silverfish" robots that slither around on the ground. A nice concept - snakes are fairly adept at navigating a wide variety of terrain, and once you've designed one body segment you can mass-produce them easily - but on closer inspection I'm 90% sure that their heads are made from toys of the snowspeeders from Star Wars.

I recognised them as snowspeeders immediately, which probably tells you a lot about just how much of an engaging, interesting person I am.

I'll spare you the details of how I fought my way through literally hundreds of Terminators, speeder-snakes and flying drones and take you straight to the boss. The boss is a wall, but an important wall. A wall that's made of computers. A wall that hides the key to unlocking mastery of time itself. It is also a wall with a great many rocket launchers, so you'll be wanting to blow them up first.
In this boss battle, the focus is on survival. The Skynet Wall spews out a near-constant stream of rockets and electrical blasts that demand all your attention, leaving you with little opportunity to actually hit the boss itself, but if you just keep firing enough of your shots will get through to cause some damage and after a long and tedious fight you can finally go back to the Nineties.

Yes, I am aware of this. It is the entire premise of both this game and the movie on which it is based. Thanks anyway, though.

Now that we've caught up to the events of Terminator 2, the game promptly ignores the first half of the movie. No hassling bikers for their outfits, no facing off against the T-1000 in a shopping mall and most surprisingly of all, no chase scene through the flood channels of Los Angeles, a scene I've always considered to be the most iconic one in the movie beside possibly the liquid nitrogen bit. Instead you're taken directly to Cyberdyne headquarters so you can destroy all their work before they invent Skynet. That's your mission briefing for this stage, it literally says "DESTROY EVERYTHING!". Yes, even the cuddly purple dinosaur hanging from the ceiling. We can't take any chances.

Trying to prevent you humanity-saving rampage are all the cops in Los Angeles. When you shoot them, they crawl away clutching their non-lethal injuries, which is a nice tie-in to the movie where John tells the Terminator he's not allowed to kill anyone. The unfortunate side-effect of this is that it makes me a little self-concious about my marksmanship when I clearly shoot a policeman right in the face and he drags himself off-screen holding his leg.
What else is happening in this stage? Well, Sarah Connor keeps running in front of my crosshairs, I know that much. The police completely ignore her as she scurries around setting bombs, but I had no such luck and I ended up shooting her every time she popped up on screen. Fortunately I don't think you can kill her, but by appearing suddenly and moving quickly she distracts the player from shooting at their real targets - that is, every other square inch of the screen.

Oh good, now it's John's turn to get all suicidal. My mission to keep John Connor alive could possibly have been simplified by not bringing him to largest gun battle in US peacetime history. It's not just guns, either - those scientist are showing admirable / moronic (delete where appropriate) loyalty to Cyberdyne by facing the Terminator armed with nothing more deadly than bottles of Orangina. It's lucky for them that the Terminator has been ordered to only shoot to wound, because the orange-flavoured soft drink is only refreshing when taken orally and not when someone chucks it at your head.

John rushes to collect the leftover bits from the Terminator that was destroyed in the original film, because Terminator 2 is a paradox-spotter's dream movie. He needn't bother, because as the counter at the top of the screen shows I managed to leave over one hundred pieces of equipment undestroyed. In my defence, I don't think it's actually possible to destroy all the equipment, at least not if you're playing alone. There's simply too much of it and too many other things to train your guns on: maybe if you ignored all the police officers and beverage-toting scientists you'd stand a chance, but because we're in the present now high-powered plasma rifles and portable missile systems aren't so easy to come by and you're forced to use a machine gun and a shotgun, and they don't have quite the same destructive capabilities. Still, it's a nice touch - it would have been easy for the developers to not make that change, but they definitely made a real effort to provide an authentic Terminator 2 experience.

The T-1000 pops up, but he's too late and we are outta there. What's he going to do, chase us in a helicopter?

Well, that seems a trifle unfair. Up until now T2 has been a particularly tough entry in the lightgun genre, but that was mostly down to the sheer number of enemies and projectiles the game throws at you. In this stage, however, the game's credit-munching tendencies really take off by placing you in a gunfight where one mistake will send you back to the start of the stage. The helicopter swoops in from off-screen and attempts to ram the van containing John and his mum, and you have to scare it away by shooting it a few times. If you're not quick enough it hits the van, kills the occupants and forces you to either start again or wheel away from the game in disgust.

Then the T-1000 gets a truck, which is much easier to deal with because you can see where it is all the time and it can't fly in from above. I don't know why the T-1000 is sitting in the driver's seat, the only place where he'd be a visible target. He could have moved further back and operated the vehicle with his stretchy limbs or just pooled into the footwell. He would have won then, because I would have been able to see him. The real reason for Skynet's failure is that it can't think outside the box.

Just like in the movie, the T-1000 chases our heroes into a steel mill where his truck full of liquid nitrogen becomes a liability. As any child of the Nineties can tell you, liquid nitrogen will freeze an evil Terminator solid, so it's a good job the villainous machine didn't hijack a truck carrying a thousand gallons of semi-skimmed milk.
In this boss battle, you have to lower the T-1000's temperature by shooting the truck so it spills liquid nitrogen all over your nemesis. This sounds easy, but the T-1000 is constantly on the move, each spillage is concentrated in a very narrow area and if you don't constantly keep dousing him his temperature goes back up. Oh, and he's trying to kill you, naturally. There are some parts of this that work in your favour, though - for one thing a gentle rain of collectable shotgun shells falls from the sky, and it's a good job too because your standard gun takes an age to penetrate the tanker. Your best bet is to cause a leak just ahead of where the T-1000 is walking and then shotgun his legs so he falls over and stays in the stream for a while.

Eventually he freezes and is shattered into thousands of pieces by a single bullet. Does Arnie say "hasta la vista, baby" when he does this? You bet your ass he does, and yes, it's still cool. Some things you never grow out of, and if I did ever stop thinking that scene was cool I think that would be the time to pack it in.

The steel workers are back, and they are pissed. Determined to protect the Holy Foundry from these interlopers, they have no hesitation about rappelling down from the ceiling and unleashing furious hot lead death on anyone who encroaches on their territory, even if it's just some kid and his robot slave. This section was so unexpected and so incongruous that it got a much bigger laugh from me than most videogames' honest attempts at humour, so well done to Midway for that.

At last we have reached the final encounter, and the T-1000 is determined to kill someone and he doesn't really mind who. Sometimes he'll pop up right in your mush and unload clip after clip from his handgun into your chest, other times he'll wander off and stab John Connor with his pointy metal arms. In that instance you instantly fail and are sent back to the start of the stage, so make sure you distract the T-1000 with as many shotgun blasts as you can muster if you see him heading towards John.

I'm sorry, I just can't accept that John Connor is that important to the future of humanity. I saw his battle plans in the future, he just drove right up to Skynet's front door, only surviving because I was there to look after him / absorb all the bullets. There must be someone more qualified who survives the apocalypse. No? No one? Really? Well, I suppose I'd better make sure I keep him alive, then.

After what feels like an extremely long time and with the aid of the occasional grenade launcher that floats down from on high, the T-1000 will be pushed back to edge of the smelting pool. I was hoping for a comically gently finger-poke to send him over the edge - hey, after the Steel Workers Assassination Squad I wouldn't have been surprised - but no, bullets will have to suffice and the T-1000 is terminated.

Well, I'm glad that's over, I was starting to get finger cramps. The T-1000 takes a hot bath, John Connor survives only to be emotionally scarred by the sight of the only thing he's ever considered a father being destroyed and the world is safe from nuclear armageddon.

Okay, so maybe not. Because I was too focussed on not dying to blow up every disk drive and filing cabinet in Cyberdyne headquarters, the world is still screwed. Thanks for that, Midway. If you do, by some miracle, manage to destroy all the objects, this bit of text is changed to say that the world is safe. I think that's the only difference. I'm glad I didn't bother.

As lazy an ending to the article as this is, if you like Terminator 2 the movie you'll probably enjoy Terminator 2: Judgement Day the arcade experience. While the game itself is a middling gallery shooter with sections of unsporting, coin-draining difficulty, one thing you can't fault it on is just how Terminator-y it is. Voice clips from the movie play frequently, the original actors appear - my only problem with the presentation is that at no point do you get to hear Axl Rose sing "youuuuu could be mi-i-ine", and I'm happy to accept that might not be something you're personally disappointed about.
All told, it's little wonder that this was one of the most common arcade games of my childhood: I don't think I ever visited an arcade in the Nineties that didn't have a T2 cabinet, and why not? It's a movie ripe for videogame conversion and despite the age rating it's the ultimate movie for boys: killer robots, action sequences up the wazoo and an emotional element to the story that young boys can allow themselves to be affected by because it involves Arnie. The game's not nearly as good as the movie, but I'm glad to have finally played it all the way through, and those steel workers? They were one hell of an unexpected bonus.

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