Oh boy! Even at the time I got the distinct feeling Rise of the Robots was being over sold.
Rise of the Robots was on the cover of countless magazines.
It generated so much hype and excitement that many people believed it was the only game being released in 1994.
Back then Rise of the Robots was truly the poster-boy for the Next Generation of games consoles. It heralded the arrival of a world without floppy disks - We've got CD baby!
Sadly for us 3DO and PC owners, this exciting new dawn of the CD era, once the dust had settled, amounted to the same games but with lots of streaming media.
Streaming media as it turned out, wasn't all that exciting. Maybe if the Streaming CD media had been written by Hollywood script writers, things might have been better. We could have totally ignored the games and just watched the Full Motion Video. Sadly they were not. And it showed.
Rise of the robots is a fighting game.
Try to imagine a fighting game where you can only select one character to fight with. Try to imagine a fighting game where you only have four moves. Try to imagine a fighting game where you only need one button. Try to imagine a fighting game where you always face right.
Did the developers run out of time? Did they run out of money? Perhaps it is possible I guess, they all went through puberty upside down. Who knows? Who cares? This game is very bad, possibly the worst game ever. And for that award it has got some pretty stiff competition on the 3DO.
Good points? If I'm forced to double the rose-tinting on my specs, I could, at a stretch, point out that Brian May from Queen did the music. And that some of the rendered scenes are very good. And even, the last challenger known as 'Supervisor', was well animated.
But the rest is so appalling, so very bad, so utterly contemptible that these minor oasis' of light quickly whither in the gloom that is the rest of the Rise of the Robots.
Even the robot designs seem to have been borrowed from other sources. One for example looks like it was pinched from the Dire Straits video, Money for Nothing. Another looks like the fork lift used by Ripley in Aliens. Yet another looks like it was borrowed from a Japanese anime and the final boss is the liquid metal Terminator from T2.
Rise of the Robots is a legend. Possibly even a myth. A story told at night to scare developers. To keep them on their toes. It is a warning hanging over each and every new generation of video game and video game system. If it was a poster boy, it says 'Don't let this happen to you!'.
Get a copy if you can. It is, without a doubt, a piece of gaming history.
3DO Kid.
