Terminus (1987) Full Review and Movie Download

 

This is a picture of the AI mouth that installed in the dash that speaks with an 80's Breakin' slang

In a dystopian future, where the kid from Robocop 2 and the love interest of Indiana Jones share the screen, a sport that requires an AI driven truck to reach Terminus reigns supreme. Mix two parts Mad Max with one part Cyborg 2, and you have the recipe for Terminus. (Watch full movie here!)

This is awesome, and required for maximum future-lulz

Sometime around the year 2037, a truck named Monster is designed by a boy genius to drive by itself and the lady from Indiana Jones is talking to the truck for about the first third of the movie. Eventually, we meet our main villain:

Take me seriously.

Complete with fish net fingerless gloves, our confused super-bad is very upset by some voice speaking to him through a speaker for a while. I'm not sure at this point if I should be concerned or not, but I'am. 

The mouth gets more screen time than the leads.

I can't talk enough about the AI truck mouth. It's constantly talking in an exaggerated african-american wise cracking tone that is really off putting, getting a ton of screen time. Occasionally to my delight, the little TV's under the mouth would show random anime, and when asked was told it could one of two things, evil, just a short circuit that made the anime display on the screens. 

Not today sucka's

At some point the Baseball Furies from The Warriors stop the convoy from going any futher. Previous to this, the AI mouth truck would just plow through everything and make things explode. I would dwell on this, but we get transported right into a nightmare world of reused sets and props from other movies, with the only exposition a sex scene with a robot hand. 

I'm not sure what I was expecting

It's awkward and full of cringe.. exactly how I like it. We meet some more mini-bosses, an irate jacked italian guy who likes 80's video games, and this guy who is terrible at arm wrestling.

This is not what is concerning, which is amazing

We learn that our metal armed friend has orange teeth, is great at drinking and arm wrestling and has no issues taking over the helm of the AI mouth winnebago after Marion from Raiders eats shit. Yes, she dies, and I'm not sure why she was written out. I think I missed something?

Monster the AI mouth truck is equipped with a Mr Coffee    

How delighted was I to see that the AI mouth truck has a coffee machine hidden away in the center console. It pours automatically and then reminds our new hero that it's bad for him. Our hero with orange teeth, one arm, and is also super drunk. More anime displays on the little TV's in the cab, and there is some kind of bullshit going on outside that makes me wonder what I'm doing watching this movie to begin with. 

I fucking love fake GPS

Is there anything more exciting than fake GPS? Not since Star Wars wire frame garbage have I seen something so spectacular. All of a sudden, I'm back in this movie 100%, my faith renewed. 

Oh fuck! The baseball furies have teamed up with the Tarzan Bikers!

What comes next is the single most important shot of the movie: A long tracking shot of this cool city with 1000% fucking random nonsense going on. Click the Tarzan Bikers link above and just give it a watch, I swear its the most amazing this you will ever see, only lasts like 2 minutes and appears to be France? I'll try to write down just a few things in this scene below:

• Asian Mimes
• Biker Tarzans
• A motorcycle driving on a high-wire
• A man with a turban with a huge snake in a wicker chair
• Glow in the dark prostitutes
• A pantless man wearing a ringmaster jacket
• An avante garde cockfight
• An outdoor strip club pinball arcade
• A VR flashback that includes a bloody fetus
• The AI truck upset at a man playing harmonica

Holy fucking shit. 

There appears to be a boy genius fetus farm out in the desert, and our hero discovers it. This is so beyond the budget of this film, I'm honestly floored on how they got this to work. Our hero is really upset at the visual, but not enough to like.. do anything or save them. 

HR Giger would be proud

Channeling Outland and Aliens, there is no shortage of cool practical wet slimy alien fetuses and screaming AI children hooked up to steampunk brewing equipment. Want an unborn baby espresso with steamed milk? I think we can handle that. 

This looks fun

Looks like that's the end of the movie, and it ends with our hero saving the AI genius kid from Robocop 2, and says something witty. The credits roll with a mix of wireframe bullshit and 80's new wave pop synth which is a really good way to conclude such a top tier piece of shit. Honestly- How did this get made? It's obviously not that low of a budget. It has some brand name actors billed out. How did I not know this existed previously? High grade trash, and I'm here for it. 

Coors Banquet is the Anime Beer of Choice - Vol. 2

 

From the Anime OVA, California Crisis [1986] - 6:37

Griffin Dunne Smokes Camel Lights (Soft Pack)

 

From the Martin Scorsese movie, After Hours [1985] {36:37}

80's & 90's Arcade Movie Scenes - Part 2

 

From Robocop 2 [1990] Featuring Peter Weller

80's & 90's Movie Arcade Scenes - Part 1

 

From the the movie, Surf II [1984] Featuring Eric Stolz

Coors Banquet is the Anime Beer of Choice

 

As seen in the OVA Mad Bull 34 at 23:51

Fox Harris smokes Cloves

 

From the movie Forbidden World - 1982 - 11:57

Megazone 23 [1985] Part 1

 

Sharon Stone Smokes Camel Lights (Hard Pack)

 

As seen in the movie 'Cold Steel' - 1987, 25:51

The Venerable RTX 2080

I've had this thing forever.

     A little history: I bought my RTX 2080 OC on launch day for $849 from Best Buy. It had been years since I bought a card on launch day, and I wanted the best, and the RTX 2080 was the IT card at the time. I had an aging 1070 that performed perfectly, and is still hard at work in the PC next to me my son uses for school, paired with my old 8700k.. chugging along just fine.

The lineup at the time.

     I had no idea that I would have been better off with the GTX 1080ti. I was told by Nvidia and their marketing department that the card would have ray tracing and 8GB of their new memory would be enough. For $300 less dollars, I could have got the 1080ti, but I wanted the new hot performing card. 

I was lied to.

     The numbers came out no sooner than I got the card home and in my PC. The 1080ti with a mild overclock and a fan on it would easily beat the shit out of the 2080, and later, they added RTX support for the card. It was looking like I was had, and I paid too much. Relegated to my fate, I made the best of it, and overclocked the dogshit out of the poor 2080 for the next 4 years. 

This is a 2080 after 4 years of overclocking.

I gamed on this card like it was my last. If I'm paying $849 for something that was beat by a previous generation, so be it. I started competitive Overwatch in 2018, and went top 500 for almost a year in FFA, and you can imagine what that does to a card. There are chinese bitcoin miner rigs that have less hours on their cards than my poor 2080 does. 

This is for beginners.

     I'm still salty. I've since built several PC's for my gaming family, and upgraded my own PC, and now we have two 30 series GPU's in the house that out perform the 2080, but not in my PC.. no way. I'm stubborn, and this fucking nerd is going to extract every ounce of longevity out of this card; so I did what at PC enthusiast would do, I repasted the die, put new thermal pads on, and replaced the whining dead fans with new OEM ones... then cranked it up to 11. For the next year and a half, I ran the card on the ragged edge, even going so far to buying an after market GPU socket fan to blow even more air on the card, and mounting a high performance fan on the side to hopefully exhaust even more of the hot air away.

New year.. same me.

     Now its the middle of 2024, and I just took my PC apart to clean it, and guess what, the 2080 is still in there, chugging along, overclocked to the moon and screaming during my extended playthrough of the new Robocop game with DLSS on. On epic settings, still over 100fps, fans on 91% of max, sitting at 77c temps under load. I'll be honest, I did not think this card would last 6 full years dialed up to 11. Like I mentioned, I have a slot fan and a blow fan aimed directly at it at all times and have done some work on it to keep it alive, but I never expected this kind of value from a card that no one wanted, and no one should have bought. After years of eSports and every triple A title from the last 6 years, this card has performed amazing, and never left me feeling like I needed to upgrade right away. My son's new PC, which is a 14700k with a 4070ti is light years ahead of my 10700k rig, but I still don't feel like I'm missing anything. I played 80 hours of Baldur's Gate at 100fps on epic settings very recently with zero issues or crashes. I've made up my mind, I'm going to wait until the 50 series drops, and get a 40 series card on sale and move on with my life.. but I wanted to share how my mistake turned into one of the best gaming choices of my adult life. 

Circuit's Edge Theme on an MT32

 

Dark Seed (1993) - An Overlooked H.R. Giger DOS classic

 

Even the box art was ahead of it's time. 

He has a splitting headache. 

     Before we get started, you can play this classic game free in browser online, located here. I highly suggest you get started. Dark Seed is a point and click game, modified from its SCUMM engine roots, and features a robust and dark theme from the very beginning. You visit other worlds that make little sense, aliens are abundant, and the scenes are vast. You play the game through a curtain like you are watching a show, which adds to the tone of the game. 

Forget the door, there is an alien baby here. 

     This game does have it's flaws, but when you mix equal parts H.R. Giger artwork and Michael Cranford of Bard's Tale fame, you are going to land on something special. The music was generic, but haunting in a low budget horror movie way. The game is strangely monotone in color, but advanced in resolution;  Giger himself said he could not work with the pixelated 300x200, and insisted on 640x350, at the sacrifice of the enhanced color pallet. The cover comes from one of Giger's famous art works from 1974, Li II. From the wikipedia article on the production of the game:

"Developers used an Epson flatbed scanner to import selected body parts and landscape fragments in monochrome, then with Deluxe Paint II Enhanced for MS-DOS assembled them into single images. An Amiga and an S-VHS camera digitized actors' poses that Cyberdreams further edited on PCs. After the company decided that the images were inadequate late in the development process, developers hand colored the art for six more months.^[7] The main character, Mike Dawson, is named after the game's designer and producer. He also lent his appearance to the character's sprite."

The NES version is a Famicom oddity, turned real.

     Dark seed is one of the rare games that only comes along every so many years. It has no right to exist and have the budget it has, and was made to work with available resources and technology of the day. I find it very facinating that it's following was so vast that an unknown person created a Japanese port of the game to NES, unlicensed of course. A fan made translation is underway. 

     Dark Seed 2 came out in 1995 with further enhanced graphics and more of that nightmare feel and ambiance. Not nearly the sleeper hit of the first game, Dark Seed 1 and 2 had their fair share of ports, including the Sega Saturn with rare mouse support. Either way, put this game on your radar on any platform, it's really worth it.. and what do you know! You can play the second one online in the browser for free as well.