Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
Dec 5, 200324 July 2004, 6:18 PM: Judgment Day. The world begins its downward spiral towards the end of civilization and humanity on this day. Over 150 missiles will be launched in the first moments of the onslaught set in motion by Skynet's self-aware system. Few survive to even be a part of the struggle for existence that becomes daily life afterwards. Those that do manage to stay alive face famine, fallout affliction, enslavement, and constant fear of mechanized attack. There is no future.
And all I have to say after playing this game is: Armageddon, hurry, hurry!
A rush job of epic proportions, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is a system failure from the very first second you turn it on and realize it's the same engine as the abhorred Fugitive Hunter. The second of two gigantic movie-to-game "synergy" projects (the other of which being Enter The Matrix,) Atari Games clearly wanted to place T3 in that same limelight, and has devoted about every single resource at the company (seriously -- the credit list starts at the fold of the manual) to whip out a production with the same highlights that Enter The Matrix grabbed press for. Sacrifices were obviously not an issue -- when you cram your major franchise into the format and game engine for a title that had already been canned once and dumped to another publisher, the writing is on the wall. Whereas Shiny had all of the money, resources and access possible to craft a new engine, design gameplay in tune with the film, and integrate the game production needs seamlessly with the movie production, T3's dodgy transitions and pathetic mish-mash of live action and CG in a senseless FPS design clearly not right for the franchise has the echo of a board room, "Oh yeah, us too" running through the experience.
Presentation
Based half in the shown continuity of the movie and half in the imagined backstory of the Terminator franchise, you are Arnold Schwarzenegger (AKA the T-850 Terminator) on a mission to protect John Conner from a superior model robot sent back in time to assassinate the future resistance leader. Players get to experience the horrors of post-apocalypse Earth living from the eyes of a Terminator as you fight through several stages of F/K and T-model warfare on a mission to infiltrate Skynet and take command of the time portal, then slip into the leather jacket and Ray-Bans of present-day Terminator once it arrives here on its quest to save John from the T-X.
Gameplay
That's a minor gripe compared to the rancid meat that makes up the rest of this game. This game terminated any hope when Atari decided to stick the franchise into the Fugitive Hunter FPS engine. Just thinking about it blindly before playing the game, I couldn't help but think that first-person shooting just didn't seem to be what The Terminator was all about, but it wasn't until I had suffered through the entire game that I realized how moronic the fit was -- I haven't seen the third film, but apparently, in this one, the Terminator doesn't go around shooting much ... not good material for a SHOOTING game. The first half of the game has Arnold blasting T-model killers, but as soon as he's shot back in time, he hasn't got much to do but beat up the T-X every now and again, occasionally shooting some cops in the leg when the time comes. I spent a couple nights off and on playing through the first few stages, but as soon as I reached the present, I whipped through the game in about two hours before even realizing something had happened. It's asinine design -- early stages run for a good half-hour, but stages in the barren present may offer as little as two minutes of challenge as you run down a hall and blast one or two H/Ks before switching open a door and clearing the stage.
And yet, guess which stages are the ones with the fun guns and the cool baddies...
Black Ops' shooter engine was too rusty and junky last time out, and taken to the major franchise level of The Terminator, its scrap parts stick out for even more tetanus-filled pain. The developers left out the ability to customize the control of the sticks to the more standard look/move configuration instead of its look+strafe configuration, but it honestly doesn't matter -- you need the controls for aiming much in this game anyway. T3 eschews the subtle aim-assist of better FPS games for a Syphon Filter-style lock-on button that turns the entire game into a mobile shooting gallery. Just hold down the left shoulder button, and all that's left to do is blast away!
Then there are the fisticuff fight sequences, which are, in a word, a joke. They always were a joke back when they showed up in Fugitive Hunter, and the Rock 'Em Sock 'Em button mashing here isn't improved much. There's some damage effects when you toss a Terminator into boxes or onto a tile floor, and the "combo" system is slightly deeper, but otherwise, these one-on-one slapfights are the kind of mini-game cheapie relics from bad PS1 and SNES games that should never have survived into the next-gen console world. The good news is that, with numbskull cyborgs like Arnold Schwarzenegger (his character, that is) duking it out, the stiff animation and robotic gameplay actually fits the characters. The bad news is, it still isn't fun in the slightest.
Graphics
Presentation elements like that broken cinematic example are just pathetic for a game that prides itself on its presentation. The way fighting scenes end with a hugging grapple scrum like a boxing match with no ref to pull the tuckered-out battlers apart is just sad. Even the final, climatic battle with the T-X just sort of fades to black for a cinema to load up, and then the game is over. Other cut scenes are more dramatic for no reason -- one in-engine scene shows Arnold in close-up turning on a switch ... truly amazing. And while stiff animation on the terminator robots isn't exactly against what's supposed to be there, the way these giant robots fall down gently when shot kind of takes away from their killing menace. I could swear I saw one terminator mocapped to look behind it as it fell to see that it wasn't about to land on something uncomfortable...
The graphic choice of systems on this game is an easy one -- rent and quickly return it on whatever system you prefer. We haven't have the joy of testing the Cube version, but both Xbox and PS2 chunk up at the same 20-something framerate, chugging even more at inopportune times (though neither system seems affected by having too many figures or effects going on -- it's just purely a mater of architecture clogging both boxes randomly.) The washed-out walls and lame character models are the same across the systems, and the Xbox can't boast much better results against aliasing. Load times are also sandwich-ready on both systems (and you will have to reload the already-loaded stage completely if you want to restart.) And don't worry, the graphic glitches and wonky animations (check out how soldiers are animated only at the knees and shoulders while running) are shared across the platforms. Sound
Impressively, there is a place where Black Ops has delivered on the high-profile of this franchise -- T3: Rise of the Machines makes use of the DTS Interactive sound engine. At first, we assumed the DTS logo on the back was just for cutscenes, but popping the game in to play, we were surrounded by panning surround effects from the running game. Not many PS2 games offer the effect, so big ups to the tech team in this department (Pro Logic II is also included for those without DTS receivers.) Whether gamers will want to crank up their DTS systems may be another issue.
The music in the game is pure Medal of Honor -- except for a few anvil hits, I can't imagine the heroic scales and trilling flutes in this score could be mistaken for music from any Terminator score. I don't know for sure what music played over the movie, but the clash in style and tone with the stark and cold original Terminator score by Brad Fidel just doesn't fit (which you'll be reminded constantly of when the memorable T2 score kicks in occasionally.) ©2003, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
First off, lasers are no fun against robots. Robots are big, and metal, and not really all that afraid of high-tech flashlights. Sure, eventually they'll absorb enough energy to overload and blow up, but as this game proves, getting there ain't worth the energy. T3 developer Black Ops didn't help matters much by forgetting to put impact effects like fires or sparks on the bodies of the terminators as you pew-pew them with lasers, so the first 6 stages of the game are about as fun as pretending to shoot people with your index finger and cocked thumb.
For all the yammer from Arnold in press quotes and the chatter of all involved in the DVD-like extra section of this game, you'd think T3 would at least something fancy to talk about. Not a chance -- the Fugitive Hunter engine strikes again with incredibly low-res wall textures and janky special effects. And by special effects, I'm meaning the special effects that actually show up, like the way F/K Kites explode in a white puffball, the way terminators have to be repositioned slightly before keying into the explosion animation, or the hysterical kludge "shiny metal" texture on terminators that's applied to their whole frame that makes them look like they're made of water. (Think the blobby dark pools in Super Mario 64.) There are plenty of special effects that don't even go off -- boxes and enemy minibots sometimes just disappear instead of exploding when shot, and there's an awkward moment of nothingness with a missing (and probably censored) laser blast from a terminator as it kills a soldier in a close-up cinematic.
Apparently, Kate Brewster and her future soldiers who sent back the Terminator this time found a later model quip-equipped T-850. Otherwise, we would have lost out on Arnold's trademark lines like "Got It" and "Terminated." Atari banked heavily on getting Arnold into the recording booth for this game, even if the end result is about as many lines as Midway's old arcade light gun shooter -- not too far past what we were expecting from the typically monosyllabic Terminator, so I guess they got their money's worth. Nick Stahl shows his youth by reprising his role in the game, while Claire Danes claims that skirts don't go with games and bows out to a replacement (who's a pretty good sub -- and I guess the devs got even with Danes by making her in-game character model look HORRIBLE.)