Terminator 2 review: the mounted gun that got tired

The gun is bolted to the cabinet, heavy and cold, and the screen shows a ruined city full of chrome skeletons. You squeeze the trigger and it just keeps firing. For about ten seconds, it feels like the best game in the building. Then the bullets start coming slower.

A trigger with a memory

The machine gun fires automatically while the trigger is held, and ammunition never runs out. But a power gauge drains with extended shooting and slows the rate of fire, and it only refills when you let go. That is the smartest idea in the cabinet. It turns an unlimited gun into a rhythm: burst, release, burst, release.

Beginners hold the trigger the whole time and wonder why the robots are winning. Better players tap in bursts and fire hardest at the moments that matter. The button on the side fires the heavy stuff, missiles in 2029 and shotgun shells later, and those supplies do run out, so saving a few for a flying hunter-killer becomes its own small plan.

The gun never ran out. It just asked you to breathe.

A movie you walked through

Several actors from the film reprise their roles, and the digitized graphics made it look like the movie was happening on the screen. Up to two players take the part of the T-800 across seven stages, first in the future war and then in the present, riding with John Connor to the finale where you knock the T-1000 into molten steel. The game even makes you care who gets hurt: in the war stages you lose points for every human casualty.

The ending you could lose

At Cyberdyne the job is to destroy the lab equipment, all of it. Do that and you earn the better of the two endings. Miss some, and the game tells you the future is still in danger. It is a small touch, but it gave a movie tie-in a real goal beyond staying alive.

What it meant back then

In American malls this was the headline cabinet. The film was the biggest thing in theaters, and here was a machine with two guns that let you be the Terminator for a few quarters. It stood near the front of the arcade so people walking to the food court could see it, and pairs of teenagers held those guns like they had rehearsed it in the car. At home the versions were called T2: The Arcade Game, but nothing felt like the mounted gun.

Playing it now

The trigger design still holds up. Play in bursts, save the heavy shots, and watch the gauge. It is a loud, faithful movie game that happens to contain one very good idea about restraint.