"The SNES Version Sadly Looked Even Worse Than This Screenshot"

Its dark form slithers through the grass, its black sinuous form always just at the edge of your vision. You can smell it. Its dark and hoary smell sending the primal reptile portion of your brain into overdrive.

Run. Get away.

This is beyond the scope of any mere mortal, this is the kind of thing you joke about with your friends as you sit around a campfire. All the while knowing in your heart, that those ancient stories are true. No matter what our modern science tells us.

We know. There are things in this world that simply should not be.

Not since Shaq returned with da’ “Shaq Fu” has a fighting game so blatantly assaulted your face with terrible. The original Terminator movies promised a future in which robots had pretty much wiped out all humans with a huge nuclear war. I would still prefer that future to the one depicted in Rise of the Robots. I have seen slow motion footage of sea sponges fighting underwater that was more exciting than the fights in the Rise of the Robots games.

I got the first game for the SNES for Christmas one year, and I believe it is because Santa Clause was trying to murder my childhood. Yes this game was so terrible that it made me think jolly old saint Nick is a childhood murderer. And if that concept doesn’t give you a shiver down your spine then you might just be ready for the vile darkness that is Rise of the Robots.

This game is from what I call “the dark times”.

“Street Fighter 2″ had come out and sold like bacon wrapped in bacon. Just about every publisher decided that they needed to put out a fighting game. Most of them were terrible and “Rise of the Robots” is one of the worst. If you were a video game fan at that time you are probably familiar with the kind of slapped together, unbalanced, slow, and not fun games I am talking about. With most of them you could tell by looking at the lame character designs and sub par graphics. “Rise of the Robots” tricks you with rad characters and slick graphics. The game was gorgeous for the time and hold up well today. The problem lies in the very small move-sets for each character and the sluggish controls.

As if this game wasn’t evil and terrible enough, they released a sequel for the Saturn and PS1, and again the cool box art tricked my mom into buying it for me.

I never had the heart to ask if she paid full price for them. I hope that she got them from the bargain bin. So not only am I the “proud” owner of “Rise of the Robots”, I am also the “proud” owner of Rise 2: Resurrection.

The sequel looks even better than the original, but still suffers from the same lack of gameplay.

I think the worst kind of games are those that should be awesome. The concept behind these games lends itself perfectly to an amazing fighting game. The potential of using robots rather than people opens up all kinds of possibilities for attacks. Rather than pushing the limits of what fighting games can do, Robots falls back on the simplest of move-sets, which still feel slow and unexciting.

For a fighting game to work, you need at least 3 basics: control, balance, and speed. If you can get these 3 down everything else is just window dressing. Unfortunately, the 2 Robot games fail on all 3 of these aspects and are now little more than sad Christmas memories.

In high school, when I was working at the Dairy Queen, I saw a co-worker shove his hand in the fryer to see if he could pull it out fast enough that it wouldn’t hurt. His screams startled the customers as he tried to run water over his boiling hand.

I give the Robots games a score of that guy.

Tags: Evil, Rise of the Robots, Robots, Santa Clause, SNES

This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.