Rise of the Robots

Rise of the Robots is a fighting game developed by Instinct Design, an in-house studio of British developer Mirage Technologies (Multimedia) Ltd. Its release was originally planned for Amiga and DOS, although it later received ports to multiple systems. It had a heavy advertising campaign that cost its publisher Time Warner Interactive more than a million pounds sterling, which was unprecedented at the time. Its first announcement to the public was made during the 1993 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and it quickly gained popularity thanks to its innovative three-dimensional graphics generated with Autodesk's 3D Studios. It also had a strong advertising campaign in television programs and specialized magazines in which its developers took the opportunity to generate expectations not only thanks to its excellent graphics but also mentioning that it would have unprecedented Artificial Intelligence, they even went so far as to ensure that the game would be superior to Street Fighter II.

Surely no one remembers it anymore but at that time this was the game that managed to generate the most hype in the community and as usually happens in these cases the final result did not live up to expectations. Its launch was a failure on all the platforms it reached and on the SEGA console its corresponding port made by Data Design Interactive was one of the worst. Not even Brian May could avoid the disaster, the famous guitarist was promoted on almost all the covers of the game indicating that they included songs composed by him but he was not really in charge of the soundtrack or composing his songs, only fragments of his songs were used inside the game. Much ado about nothing, when the title finally materialized in 1994 the promises went up in smoke and the game was battered by both the public and the press, becoming the worst video game launch for several years. And as it could not be otherwise, the editor in charge of bringing this rubbish to Mega Drive (also to Game Gear and SNES) was Acclaim who added another resounding failure to its long list of mediocrities.

MECHANICS

It’s a very traditional 1vs1 fighting game, a kind of Street Fighter with robots, and yes, I am referring to the first Capcom installment and not the second for a reason, on a mechanical level this title seems more like a game of eighties fight than a Street Fighter II rival. And although its creators promised to surpass Street Fighter II, they stayed halfway, and even less than half, this game is so basic that it loses even against the original Street Fighter. Just like in Ryu's first adventure it is impossible to perform combos, every time a character receives a hit he moves back, thus there is no way to chain attacks consecutively. We also cannot "cancel" with our special movements, which ends up making it impossible for us to make combinations before the opponent manages to rejoin. Regarding special moves, it loses out to the Capcom game, our “super advanced” cyborg barely has 2 special moves compared to Ryu and Ken's 3, and what's worse, executing his commands is more difficult than in Street Fighter (which is saying a lot). We also can't make grabs, which greatly reduces our combat options, limiting us to mashing buttons and hoping for the best, but at least we can walk, jump and block, which is something.

Controls

The button layout is almost identical to that of Street Fighter II with a 3-button controller A is light punch, B medium and C strong, with START we change the mode from punches to kicks. The only difference is if we use a 6-button controller, here A, B and C would be punch attacks while X, Y and Z are kicks, contrary not only to Capcom's input but also to common sense itself. Special moves according to the manual are executed with down, up and any attack, and back, forward and any attack. Although when push comes to shove it is very difficult to make them work, which causes us to spam the addresses and cross our fingers.

Game modes and options

The title has 2 game modes for a single player, “mission” which is the story mode, begins with the opening cinematic and we will advance in the “plot” facing our enemies one by one. There is also a training mode where we can practice in combat against the robot of our choice without wasting time with cinematics. Finally, we can face a friend in versus mode, but the first player will always use the cyborg, only the second can choose which robot to use, making it impossible to confront enemy robots against each other. We will also not be able to select the final boss, neither in training nor in versus until we have defeated him in mission mode. Regarding the options, we have three selectable difficulty levels, we can set the time limit to 30, 60 or 90 seconds or simply deactivate it. We can also disable the cinematics and special movements and configure the number of rounds to 3, 5 or, finally, the classic test to test both the music and the sound effects.

DYNAMIC

The game begins with a fairly simple pre-rendered graphics cinematic of a ship passing through the futuristic city of Metropolis 4 to give way to the introduction of our first rival. All enemies have almost identical features in which we can see them moving across a screen for a few seconds before a text is shown at the bottom giving us information about the robot in question. After defeating them, instead of a cinematic, we will simply see a static image of our defeated rival.

When the combat begins, which is obviously the central axis of the game, that is when everything begins to fall apart. The combat mechanics, although very simple, are not polished at all and with so few attack options and no projectiles, the strategic factor is almost nil. The first two enemies are very easy, and from the third onwards the difficulty jumps and the AI goes from almost absolute passivity to pressuring us all the time trying to put us against the ropes. In fact, in our first attempts the level of difficulty may be high but this is mostly due to a tactical error, you should not play this fighting game as if it were a fighting game. We have to put ourselves in the role of a machine, cold, calculating and without remorse, our best attack is kicks, on the ground and in the air since they have more range than the rest of the attacks. With this in mind we must limit ourselves to pressuring the opponent by throwing one kick after another until we corner him. In fact, if we use flying kicks it is better since if the enemy tries to jump we can knock him down. On the internet we can see countless gameplays where they manage to finish the game on any difficulty just by using flying kicks.

The “unprecedented” Artificial Intelligence that Mirage promised is neither intelligence nor anything, not only does it not memorize our movements and learn to counter them as promised, but it simply limits itself to throwing endless attacks randomly or just defending itself without any intention to counterattack.The responsiveness of enemies is a fundamental factor in fighting games, these must be challenging to keep us entertained, in an ideal world each one has their weaknesses and strengths, forcing us to change strategy depending on which opponent we face. In Rise of the Robots none of this happens, beyond the aesthetic differences between the characters, they all behave in a similar way and we can all defeat them with the same "strategy" by spamming kicks until they fall exhausted.

Types of enemies in Rise of the Robots

A defining characteristic of this title is the lack of variety, both in movements, options, game modes and characters, there are only 6 enemies in the entire adventure. Each one with its own stage, quite simple and curiously all of them with floors that reflect the fighters, which is quite strange when the floor is made of bricks.

Android Charger

The most basic of all is limited to launching an attack from time to time and at best other times it only blocks or simply remains immobile.

Android Builder

It looks like a gorilla but in blue, it may try to attack us eventually but mostly it just blocks our attacks sometimes without counterattacking at any time.

Android Crusher

This enemy looks like a mantis if it is aggressive, it will try to corner us and take advantage of its greater range thanks to its limbs.

Military Android

A silver humanoid android with claws, it is quite aggressive and usually attacks a lot from the air, it can be a difficult rival if we do not wait for the exact moment to attack.

Guardian Android

Humanoid android with a mecha appearance, equipped with red fiberglass armor and with a reactor attached to its back, according to the game manual. It is one of the strongest enemies.

Android Supervisor

The final boss of the game is another silver humanoid but this one is clearly inspired by the T-1000 android from Terminator 2, this is noted above all by its ability to change shape as it happened in the movie.

"It is based on the physics of electrical flow and the liquid properties of the polymetamorphic titanium alloy. By adjusting the flow of electrical charges, this alloy can be remodeled (or “morphed”) into any shape".

This is the explanation that the manual gives us about the change in form of this “original” character.

Clearly the most difficult opponent in the entire game, he usually attacks a lot from the air but has no problem doing so with his feet on the ground. To defeat him we will have to apply all our mastery in the fine art of launching flying kicks and blocking, we can also do some damage and dedicate ourselves to blocking and avoiding attacks cowardly waiting for time to run out. In this game there is no worthy victory or doesn't even matter.

ESTHETIC

This section is without a doubt the strong point of the game and the main focus of its offer, in the Amiga and DOS versions it presented excellent graphics and very ahead of its time thanks to the use of renders.

Graphics

When porting it to 16-bit consoles, due to their graphical limitations, the 3D renders were replaced by pre-rendered images, as is logical. Due to this, the Mega Drive version offered a much inferior result, the pre-rendered graphics were always a weakness of SEGA's brunette since having a palette of 512 colors of which only 64 can be displayed on the screen simultaneously made it These types of graphics look quite lackluster. However, the final result is quite good, the characters look quite good and are clearly differentiated from the background, the settings also had a good appearance although they were generic in terms of their design, despite this they represent the original characters quite faithfully. The animations were fluid, with a good amount of frames, and responded efficiently to control inputs. The visual effects were quite limited, just a few particles that fell off the robots when they took damage. The cinematics that were the strong point of the original version became the biggest defect of the graphic aspect in this port, this is where the limitations of the color palette are most evident. In the case of the introduction scene, it looks really bad and with very little contrast, the presentations of the enemies were replaced by a generic scene in which the animations were limited to a small portion of the screen and lasted just two or three seconds. Considering how poorly resolved this section is, it is more advisable to deactivate the cinematics from the options menu since they are a real waste of time.

Audio

Another of the supposed strong points of the game that ended up disappointing was its music, not because it is particularly bad in itself but because the supposed music composed by Brian May was limited to three chords from one of his solo songs “The Dark”. Literally on the home screen three chords of a guitar sounds and nothing more, which ends the participation of the former Queen guitarist in this game since the music for this title was composed by workers from Mirage Technologies itself. The soundtrack is made up mostly of electronic music that fits with the general atmosphere. Personally I think it's good, it doesn't disappoint but it's not memorable or anything. The sound effects are simply acceptable, they are not of great quality but they do not hurt the ears like in other games.

FINAL IMPRESSIONS

Rise of the Robots had an excessive promotion, trying to sell it as a technological leap thanks to the innovative nature of its 3D graphics, an unprecedented Artificial Intelligence that would mark a before and after in the industry, and the collaboration of one of the most famous musicians of all time. The final result was a true disaster, it failed in each and every one of the aspects that were its main promotion. The graphics of the original version were excellent, but due to how demanding they were for the hardware of the time, the loading times were too high, not to mention the amount of space they took up. The Amiga version had 13 floppy disks to store all this information, most of which only contained the cinematics, the DOS version managed to reduce it to “just” 10 floppy disks. For the Mega Drive version, a 24 megabit cartridge was chosen, one of the largest on the platform, which despite its large size was incapable of storing all the cinematics or three-dimensional graphics. This is logical and understandable, the problem is that it is not what was promised, not only in the press and advertisements but also in the description on the back cover of the box, in which we can read the following:

“Get ready for a 24 megabyte jet game, beastly Artificial Intelligence and revolutionary three-dimensional graphics that will change your vision of fighting games.”

It reacts with quite a delay, the AI is the least intelligent that can be found and the three-dimensional graphics are a giant lie, it will change your vision of fighting games… for the worse. Rise of the Robots was a scam, too many promises were made and most of them were broken, in the case of Genesis/Mega Drive all of them. Adapting a game that is based exclusively on the quality of its 3D graphics to a 16-bit console is absurd and can only be understood as a way to maximize profits without worrying about the final result. As if that weren't enough, Acclaim had the audacity to also "adapt" it to the Game Gear. If the result on the Mega Drive was a disappointment, you can imagine how unfortunate the port to the SEGA portable was.

CONCLUSION

A mediocre fighting game, short and boring, without variety in the modes, neither in the fighters or their movements, few options in general even in versus mode, forcing the first player to always use the same character. A disappointment that is maximized by the amount of promotion it received before its launch and we are not only talking about the words not fulfilled by its creators, but also about the lies of the original packaging. It doesn't include music by Brian May (three chords are not a song) or 3D graphics and the AI is a real disaster, its box is one deception after another, at least they had the decency not to put the SEGA "seal of quality" on it , although at Nintendo they were not so honest. This work is a clear example of the saying: “don't judge a book (or game) by its cover”, it can cost you a lot and bring with it an unpleasant surprise. As always, many people had to learn it the hard way, buying this cartridge and regretting it minutes later. One of the worst fighting games of all time.