Rarely - if ever - have we witnessed such a painful licensing gaff, and the six or so hours we spent in the company of Rise of the Machines surely rank alongside the most painful we've endured in twenty odd years of videogaming.
The crushingly inevitable game tie-in, however, was always going to be a derided after its less than promising E3 showing it was just a question of how much of a complete hash Black Ops could make of it. But, ach, as much as I want to hate the cynical, gutless pointless self-parodied attempts at reviving the franchise, the third movie didhave its moments, and kept at least some of its less demanding fans happy enough for merely not being the complete pile of arse that everyone expected it to be. They had to go the whole hog and exhume the Terminator cash cow, defecate on its flaming corpse and wheel out an ageing Arnie for a familiar round of destruction, CG effects and one-liners in return for millions of dollars. The money men couldn't just leave a fantastic series alone and let its legend rest in peace.
