Sunday 28 April 2019

Fantasy Robot Wars


After a fair bit of time on the Internet Archive, I've finally found it (or most of it, at any rate): Fantasy Robot Wars, the unofficial RW equivalent of Fantasy Football Leagues way back when during the original series' run, as masterminded by Jamie McGarry, webmaster of the Panic Attack fan site. That this was the best way of inventing and battling your own robots available to us speaks volumes about the quality of the Robot Wars computer games.

Unfortunately the entry form appears to not have been archived, so I am having to reconstruct that from memory, but it was fairly straightforward: you chose your robot's body shape (from a list of options - low wedge, 'Tornado shaped', etc), two weapons, and then had to rank six attributes from best to worst (which I think were weapon power, power source, speed, armour strength, reliability and traction), and also wrote a short description, if you so wished (and, er, obviously gave it a name). I can only find one version of the rules, which were different in earlier series (by the point at which that page got archived, it looks like ranking your 'armour strength' had been replaced by being able to choose what type of armour you have, so presumably the attributes were also changed too). The listings of the robots and their statistics were kept on the site's forum, which the Archive seems to have trouble, er, archiving, so those may also be lost. Here are the battle reports, at any rate:

Series 1
Series 2
Series 3
Series 4
Series 5 (incomplete due to being most recent save available)
Series 6

I am fairly certain there was at least one more series after that, and assorted other 'special events' between series (including a World Championship), but those may have been lost to time. Nonetheless, I will keep looking...

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