Play Terminator 2 - Judgement Day - Chess Wars Online

Terminator 2: Judgement Day - Chess Wars came out in 1993 as part of the MS-DOS Classic Games series, published by Capstone Software. It was one of those odd, licensed titles that tried to merge a popular movie with a completely different genre, something that happened a lot back then. You would see these games on store shelves next to more straightforward action titles, and they always had a certain charm, even when the concept was strange.

You control the pieces on a chessboard, but each one is a character from Terminator 2; Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 is your king, for instance. The main objective is to win the chess match, but whenever you capture an opponent's piece, the game switches to a brief, clunky combat sequence where your character fights theirs in a small arena. You have to mash buttons to punch and kick until one of you is destroyed, then it returns to the board. The pacing is slow because of these constant interruptions, and the difficulty comes more from the awkward fighting than the chess strategy. It feels like playing two separate, underdeveloped games that keep interrupting each other.

Each game uses different controls, most DOS games use the keyboard arrows. Some will use the mouse , "Alt" ,"Enter" and "Space bar".