T2: The Arcade Game

“It absolutely will not stop. ever. until you are dead”

» Mega Drive » 1993 » Probe Software

Lately, i’ve been seeing a lot of talk about the difficulty of Sekiro: Shadows Die twice. Some people are calling it the hardest game they’ve ever played. You get a lot of that with any of those Fromsoftware games – a little while back, you couldn’t visit a gaming news site without seeing silly headlines like, ‘The Brutal Challenge Of Dark Souls Cured My Addiction To Strawberry Milkshake!’ To be fair, I do believe that these are the hardest games these people have played. But they don’t know the primal fear that comes with the duty to protect one orange, rusty truck containing humanity’s only hope of survival.

The third stage of Terminator 2’s videogame adaptation is a stern enough test for two players, but with one player taking the aerial Hunter-killers and another taking the T-800s on the ground, you can keep John Connor alive if you’re quick to react to threats. My dad and I were a pretty well-drilled team back in the Nineties, and we survived to see later levels. But when nostalgia drove me to revisit the game years later, I went in for a solo mission. It’s seems to be literally impossible to take out every enemy, so you can only hope to do well enough to survive. You’ll need a perfect memory of where enemies are going to appear, and even that might not be enough. Even now, hearing the music puts me on edge. Friends online shared their tales of woe, from writing down enemy entry patterns to the drastic measure of buying a Game Genie. I mentioned the stage to Drew and he said, “Oh, the end of the game?” None of us seemed to share the same approach to dealing with this pain, but one thing united us all – our desire to inflict it on the Sekiro and Dark Souls generation.