The Terminator (DOS)

I do so love The Terminator. I’m actually watching it as I type this review. Not only is it ’80s low-budget cinema at its best, but it somehow manages to involve a lot of deep sci-fi elements grounded in semi-reality. And Arnold’s puppet heads. C’mon, who doesn’t love a jerky Arnold puppet head? I would probably have reviewed every single Terminator-based game by now, but I’m well aware that the site is not called Just Terminator Games.

I also enjoy providing comprehensive reviews for games that don’t appear to have any available online. In this case, you might have already heard of Bethesda’s original version of The Terminator as a unique, groundbreaking, free-roaming title. You may have also heard of this credited as an early Grand Theft Auto. These are the very points that interested me, so I threw down $25 to bring this in from Australia (thanks Cheryl!) and answer them definitively for current and future robot-persecuted generations.

The Terminator is a unique “sandbox” title. It takes the fundamental match-up from the film – Michael Biehn’s hardened, but human, Reece against Schwarzenegger’s unstoppable Terminator – and throws the two of you into a non-linear world with Sarah Connor hanging in the balance. You choose to play as either Reece or the Terminator and battle it out in a digital rendition of nearly 60 square miles(!) of central Los Angeles. It’s quite an accomplishment for 1991, and for a game written entirely in assembly language. Innocent bystanders mill about, stores open and close, residential areas transition into high rises, and there’s even LA landmarks like Griffith Park and Dodger Stadium. It’s ambitious, while the sandbox city generally (though not always technically) works as described.

When you start as either character, you appear randomly somewhere in the game world. You’ve found clothes already, but otherwise, you have no items and no weapons. Your adversary has spawned somewhere else under the same conditions. It’s then a race between the two of you to load up on gear and find Sarah Connor as the Terminator, or defend her as Reece. The game ends when either of the three characters is defeated.

Finding weapons and equipment is easy enough, as you’re given detailed maps in-game and out. Pressing P opens a phone book listing nearby stores and their map coordinates. A large, gridded map is provided in the box, and mimicked without numbers or street names by pressing Alt-M. The area around you is marked by a red box. Pressing M alone will show a close-up of that red area, with corresponding grid numbers and nearby stores marked by color-coded dots. The Terminator has additional access to his current coordinates and heading on his HUD, making navigation even easier for him.

Once you have a location in mind, you can opt to set a marker on the map screen and be guided to that position by indicators on your HUD. You can also fast travel to any point on the map while the appropriate time is deducted. Your opponent is still actively arming himself or searching for you during this time, and your travel can be interrupted by hostile police or your opponent passing by.

You can also break into a car and drive at much faster speeds than you could manage on foot. Cars are really useful for getaways, or other situations where your fast travel is blocked by nearby foes. Cars have their own damage meters, and will injure you if they are shot to the point of blowing up (or if you crash). They can also run out of gas, forcing you to buy more at a service station or simply steal a new vehicle. These cars will be randomly either manual or automatic transmission, with increased controls for manual, though there’s no apparent benefit to driving stick. But while cops are swarming and bullets are flying, you’ll take the first car you can get.

Gun shops, pharmacies, sports stores, gun ranges, and banks make up the places you can enter. Most include bogus items that simply take up space in your inventory (duck calls, bug spray), but all of them also contain items that will be helpful in some capacity. The gun shop should be obvious, the pharmacy sells items that speed healing, and the sports store primarily has a compass that’s useful for Reece to get his bearings. In all of these stores, you can elect to purchase or steal items. As you have no money, the choice is usually obvious.

However, stealing causes that store to permanently close and call the attention of The Law. In fact, if you stand around swiping item after item, you’ll give the police time to arrive outside. Fortunately, you can never be arrested. Unfortunately, the police come out shooting no matter how petty your crime. There’s no visible “wanted” meter like in GTA, and the police don’t actively chase you, so it’s difficult to gauge the true impact of your actions on their presence. If you get caught in a shootout with cops or your opponent, more cops will certainly appear. If you’ve done anything illegal, then your likelihood of fast travel interruptions increase as police “spot” you and start shooting, which forces you to drive or walk everywhere. Your heat may drop over time, but it’s hard to tell.

The alternative is to locate a bank so you can pay for items with cash. You can rob a bank for lots of money – which definitely won’t help you avoid the police – or you can “withdraw” a randomly determined amount. I presume you’re getting a loan, and imagining Arnold monosyllabically demanding a low-interest APR is pretty funny. The catch is that banks are few and frequently closed. There’s no “wait” command – only rest, and only available if you’re injured – so you can expect to have to travel to many banks before you find an open one. Its up to you to decide if you have that kind of time. You’ll also be attracting the attention of the police eventually, simply from gunfights with your opponent, so there’s something to be said for arming up fast.

This is the groundwork, and I started having some pretty cool ideas and expectations as I read through this stuff in the manual. But one question kept coming back to my mind – how do you find Sarah Connor? There’s no ability for investigation like there was in the film; you can’t show up at her job, you can’t track her down in the phone book… so how do you find her? Simple. Both characters have a tracker that aims a green line in her direction at all times.

I thought this was going to be extraordinarily lame – finding Sarah Connor is Termie’s whole deal, and you’re just going to point her right out? But it’s probably better than having to search endless block after endless block. I was also concerned that this would ruin the length of the game, but it doesn’t. Just because you know where she is, doesn’t mean you’re ready.

Reece starts with Sarah nearby, but you’ll have to spend just as much time as the Terminator in preparation for his arrival. Luckily, Sarah is not dead weight. You can order her to follow using a command menu called up by the Q key. She’ll travel with you everywhere, including in cars and fast travel. If you order to her to stay (as you go off Terminator-hunting) or run away (if Terms ambushes you both) you can find her again using the green line tracker. She can even carry and hand over items like extra ammo or guns, though she cannot use them herself.

You can only heal by resting. You can never enter a building or truly pigeon away from your enemies, but you can find a relatively quiet spot and try to heal as much as you can. Damage to body areas has detrimental effects – head damage blinds you, leg damage slows you down, etc. A stock of pharmacy supplies helps speed this up, because you won’t have long before you’re randomly interrupted. This menu also has a very simple line graph representation of your total health versus your opponent’s, useful in knowing when to attack. Sarah has no health meter for herself. I don’t think she can be healed, or heals on her own at an unknown rate.

Rest is critical, because I was amazed at how quickly damage could add up. I stormed confidently in for my first time as the Terminator. Through a combination of Reece’s weapons and the cops attracted by the gunfire, I was blinded after a couple minutes with no particular progress. I tried to stumble away, but the cops gunned me down as Reece absconded. After being quickly blinded with both characters, I learned that pressing an attack rarely works in your favor, and retreat or escape actually becomes a very good idea. This is a face-off that’s meant to last, after all.

For what’s essentially a FPS, the controls are much more like a flight sim. A reference card covers the various keys and combos, handling everything from which way your character is looking, to fine-tuning your aiming crosshair within the screen. You won’t need most of these to play the game, and many of the view options end up more confusing than actually helpful. Guns get assigned to the function keys, so pressing one will draw it. The police respond appropriately to drawn weapons, so pressing Ctrl and that function key puts it away. The Shift key acts as a modifier to speed any action up – turning, walking, steering, accelerating – and is really the only lifesaving key on the board.

This early 3D engine is much more of a technical achievement than a graphical one. An impressively large area of central LA has been carved out – from Mulholland Drive to National Blvd, and from Beverly Drive to Central Ave – but the buildings within are all generic and made of flat, monochrome polygons. The streets’ layout seem to have been authentically recreated, but your cars completely ignore terrain. You travel at the same speed on the road as you do aiming directly at the green tracker line and gunning the engine across grass.

Game speed is decent for the time, probably 15-20 FPS, but slows to about 5 if many buildings or objects are on the screen at one time – or often for no apparent reason at all. There’s a lot of polygon tearing and disappearing, as well as a fair amount of graphical bugs in general. There’s also nothing about the game world to really make it clear you’re in Los Angeles, aside from the occasional, obscurely-rendered landmark. It’s playable, but awfully dated.

Reece and Sarah cannot hide or escape the city, so the only way either character can win is to kill the other. Unfortunately, it never seems quite like the epic confrontation it’s supposed to be. Part of the blame falls on the AI. Though your opponent does appear to stockpile weapons, they cannot use vehicles, so there will be no chase scenes. It’s fairly easy to avoid them when they can’t drive, though they still catch up with you surprisingly quickly (and surely with some behind-the-scenes cheating) if you try to rest. From the other perspective, your quarry always travels on foot, so they can’t get very far if you lose them. Cops just sort of appear without any explanation, and they always shoot at you, never at your opponent. It’s also far more difficult than it should be to aim at your foe – cops often stand still and are easy targets, but your opponent will run back and forth while seemingly having perfect aim the entire time.

Still, it’s an awesome concept, and a neat departure from the typical movie-licensed game. It doesn’t work as well as it could, or as you might like, but it does work. I wouldn’t call it an early Grand Theft Auto, as there’s not really enough focus on wandering around the city and making use of it. You can certainly drive around for the hell of it, but the focus is always on the central match-up. This game would have been revolutionary when it was released – and it’s still pretty unique – but it’s hard to recommend a purchase now. However, if you get the opportunity to check it out, and can get it running properly, it’s worth a few runs simulating the film.

 

The Good

Roughly 10 mile by 6 mile recreation of LA with 1991 home technology. Very cool way to use ideas from the film and to experience the matchup yourself.

 

The Bad

A little too early for this kind of game, and the engine is functional, but not supportive of the gameplay. Basic AI limits your allegedly deadly opponents to running back and forth while shooting.