Did you know that this year is the 40th anniversary of James Cameron’s influential, incredibly iconic sci-fi time travel masterpiece, The Terminator?

That’s right, it’s yet another event to make all of us mid-40s geeks feel really old. I remember seeing The Terminator at far too young an age, but I was immediately in awe of it; despite the one I saw being on a fuzzy, illicit VHS copy even before the film had hit UK cinemas. Which made seeing it all the more exciting, of course.

The thing that strikes me now is that this wasn’t uncommon at all; almost every kid I interacted with at school, despite being around 7 or 8 years old at the time, had also seen it at roughly the same time as me.

And we knew they had, because we talked about the events of the film in great detail; discussing future soldier Kyle Reese’s numerous, gnarly scars or those incredible Nike trainers that I still lust after, even now, for example.

Anyway, we were too young but it didn’t matter to us, or to our parents apparently; it’s not as if The Terminator was the first or last film we repeatedly watched that we shouldn’t have been watching in the first place!

Yet it took an absolute age for there to be any video games based on the film, which was odd.  Though it was released just after the US video game crash (which happened in 1983), the rest of the world was largely unaffected and 8-bit platforms such as the NES headed West from Japan not long after.

Despite this, we were already a few years into the 16-bit era (and there’d already been a cinematic sequel, which got its own video games) before the first games based on The Terminator appeared, making them feel a bit like they were in the wrong time period altogether. How appropriate!

This NES version is a run and gun, action platform title with the odd driving section too, and it’s a really strange game. Cast in the role of Kyle Reese, you have to play through the events of the film across six platform stages, starting in the future before heading back to the past to keep Sarah Connor alive.

Which sounds great, in theory, but it’s just so awkwardly designed and implemented that it’s a very difficult game to enjoy. The platforming is too reliant on precision, and the level design is absolutely batshit crazy, as if it’s designed by a not especially sentient AI (definitely not the omnipotent Skynet).

It’s interesting that enemies randomly spawn, so you’re kept on your toes and never know whether or not you’ll be attacked by, for example, a stripped-to-the-metal T800 or one that’s still covered in its human-aping skin, but this causes problems too, given that you can sometimes find yourself on the edge of a platform with nowhere to go when a Terminator attacks, leading you to lose a precious life out of nowhere.

You get three lives, and even though you can earn more from getting a high enough score, it’s simply not enough; when you lose your lives, it’s Game Over and straight back to the beginning for you.

Reese himself is a little unresponsive too, and for some reason can shoot diagonally, but not straight, upwards as well as horizontally. It’s needlessly steeped in awkward mechanics that strip the fun from the game altogether, and you’ll see the ‘You are Terminated’ screen an awful lot.

It’s just not worth persevering with, unfortunately. Which is a shame; the 16-bit, Mega Drive version of The Terminator, despite being pretty tough itself, is a genuinely decent game, and if this had been a slightly visually stripped back version of that game, it would have been so much better. As it is, it’s a platform/shooting/driving hybrid that’s as awkward and unwieldy as a T600.

Though I have returned to The Terminator movie countless times over the last four decades (and have been constantly very pleased at how well it’s held up), this belated video game adaptation is one I won’t be revisiting. Unlike the Terminator himself, I won’t be back.