Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines [PS2]

Gameplay
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.

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!

Too easy, you say? Sure, us too, and the fact that the AI on these highly-advanced terminators doesn't notice you as you plug away at them with the standard difficulty level doesn't hurt the wussy appeal of this game either. Nor does the abundance of continues in each stage. But don't worry, you'll get your share of frustrations on any challenge level -- the game's bugs and errors amp up the challenge of playing this game in all the worst ways. Your character will get stuck on or clip through rubble and minor architecture, while enemy bots will spawn in the middle of nowhere right in front of your eyes and sometimes shoot you through solid roofs. If you ever let off the button of a fully-charged assault rifle while facing a wall, your Terminator will instantly die. One stage had me shooting the kneecaps off of cops, but the game got so confused that I was aiming so low that it reset my view to look straight up at the empty sky, glitching through my body and head in the process. Some screw-ups in the game, I was never sure if it was bugs in the game or just more terrible design from the team too depressed to abort anything connected to Fugitive Hunter -- a junior high girl could underhand a softball farther than the Terminator can huck a grenade at full strength, while weapons take a dog's age to switch out (often slowly bringing up the useless weapons you passed by as you're cycling through.) I can't count the hours spent in the game's early stages trying to make buggy event triggers go off or hunting for destructible rubble in entranceways with the flakey "Terminator Vision" so I could finish the flipping stage.

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.