An arcade game (natch) based on the movie Terminator 2 :Judgement Day (sic). By lifting the gameplay mechanics from Operation Wolf, and adding lots of digitised art and sounds from the film, Bally Midway struck on a winning formula that was a permanent fixture at many arcades for years.

Probe later converted the game to the Sega Mega Drive (for publishers Acclaim, under one of their many trade names at the time). Their version was extremely faithful to the original, and was produced as a showcase for the Sega Menacer lightgun (a nifty, but woefully undersupported peripheral dreamt up by Sega of America to squeeze some more money out of the sewn-up American market).

The levels of the game roughly follow the plot (such as it is) of the film, with the player taking the role of Arnie's benevolent T-800, armed with his trusty "Uzi Nine Millimeedeer", as he battles hoards of T-1000's, hunter-killers, and the other (surprisingly varied) goons and villiains that appear along the way.

Most of the levels have some objective that isn't simply to blast everything (except in the Cyberdine labs, where you have to annihilate all trace of the SkyNet technology, including an inflatable dinosaur). The starting third level (damn you evil THC) has you defending a pickup truck in the Future War scenario. Later levels have you defending a van from the T-1000 in the helicopter, shooting cops in the knees, blasting holes in the liquid nitrogen truck to lower the T-1000's temperature so that John and Sarah Connor can escape, and eventually pushing our good friend Mr. Robert Patrick back into the molten metal, in an awesomely tense finale.

It was possible to reach the end of the game without completing all of the objectives, but you would be informed that John Connor would die, and humanity would be doomed, hey ho. Completing the game properly would get you a congratulatory message ending with "The future is what you make it."

T2 is pretty cool for a "shooting gallery" style game. Such inventive and extensive use of the source material is very unusual in a licensed game, as the developers usually knock out any old rubbish knowing the name alone will shift copies (*cough*Ocean*cough). It's also pretty much the only light gun game (bar Duck Hunt) that's worth a damn, at least until the fancy 3D generation came along (Time Crisis, House of The Dead, Vampire Night, etc. ad nauseum).

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