Anyone played these oldies? I only had a demo waay back in the 90s, but i recently found out a friend had a copy of FS & Skynet, and I have to say they are quite brilliant. Both were made by bethesda, and the missions are open-ended, non-linear style - you can even enter each burned out building you see and explore it for equipment and such.
A real feature that stood out to me - vehicles. In 1996, Bethesda incorporated flying terminator vehicles and jeeps, and they drive - like vehicles in many games today. They use the mouse to aim, and the strafing keys to turn. It uses Xngine, Bethesda's old engine and it was fully 3D (except for the weapons), much like Quake was, except it had massive outdoor environments, and came about a year before Quake.
Here's some screenshots, nothing spectacular now, but for the time, quite good. It was also the first game besides quake to feature mouselook as the main control method.
One thing that surprises me is the atmosphere of this game. It captures the look of the movies very well, but it also has a unique feel about it. I can't really put my finger on it, except it has something that many other games lack.
Soundtrack is also great, sounds straight out of terminator, but It's fairly subtle at times to keep from getting annoying.
Future Shock supported 320x200 VGA resolution. The sequel, Skynet supported SVGA 640x480 and also had a multiplayer component and the ability to play Future Shock with Skynet's enhancements if the game was installed:
The terminator games were Todd Howard's first projects as Producer and Designer. It got good reviews but It seems to have been overshadowed by the more mainstream games of the time such as Quake, Duke, Descent, etc. Even Bethesda's own RPG Daggerfall overshadowed it at the time.
What can I say? I played through a decent amount, It's a real gem - especially considering it's a terminator game, and we all know almost all games with the terminator license suck ass. It's kind of funny, these games are more true to the first 2 terminator movies by JC then the 3rd or Salvation both were.
Here's a vid of the first mission, unfortunately no music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftKusJ98OU8
