The War Games

A comparison between Crasha Gnasha's computer game and real life versions which does not bode well.

There can have been few things more inevitable at the turn of the century than a computer game based on a hugely popular television programme about members of the public building robots and making them fight each other. In fact, no fewer than five games based on Robot Wars were released, the first popping up just in time for Christmas 2000, and the last in late 2002, shortly before the final BBC series was broadcast.

The first game, Robot Wars: Metal Mayhem, was released for the Game Boy Color. The idea that you could hope to recreate the show with any great degree of accuracy on such a platform could charitably be described as ambitious. But surely what entailed could still have been better than this. I have made several attempts to write this article before now, and each time I have stopped because I find it hard to find anything that sums up Metal Mayhem better than just linking to a YouTube video of someone attempting to play it. But let's have a go anyway.

THINGS WHICH ARE BAD ABOUT ROBOT WARS: METAL MAYHEM

• Hard-to-handle controls which sent your robot out of control if you tried to turn too fast
• Terrible AI making it easy to get CPU robots to run into arena hazards simply by driving your robot to the other side of them
• Laughable "Robot Workshop" (four choices of chassis and weapon, which are largely aesthetic anyway)
• Competitor robots from the TV series which look nothing like their original versions, in multiple cases not even being the correct colour or shape
• Including several obscure robots which were knocked out in the first round and never seen again over better-known machines
• Flippers are unable to actually flip an opponent, but cause damage by physically hitting the other robot with them like an axe. Despite this, flipping is still programmed into the game, but can only be achieved by being flipped by the arena spike; robots cannot self-right, not even ones that should be able to like Chaos 2 or Panic Attack
• Mindless, repetitive gameplay
• Mindless, repetitive music
• House robots which are unable to leave their CPZ since robots cannot break down
• Robots inexplicably burst into flames when their health reaches zero

There are several attempts to recreate the show's Trials in the game's arcade mode, which are marginally more successful than the attempts at recreating actual robot combat, but even so, this is still an absolutely terrible game, and it came as no surprise at all to learn that it was developed by Tiertex, a company who also inflicted the home version of Street Fighter (and its bastard child Human Killing Machine) on the world.

Sensibly, the second game, Arenas of Destruction, was developed for the PC and PlayStation 2, and came out a year later, and took full advantage of the opportunity for better, more realistic graphics--

-- Oh.

OK, anyone who played Arenas of Destruction as a child will surely remember it best for the thoroughly unrealistic way in which weapons and bits of armour fell off, revealing the robots' curiously empty internals. But if you could look past that, and the occasional glitch, then it wasn't a bad game by any means; the Robot Workshop allowed for far, far more customisation of your robot, and whilst the various different arenas were maybe a bit daft in concept (why exactly are they holding tournaments on oil rigs and on top of skyscrapers again?) they made for entertaining variety, as well as the fun of imagining what Jonathan Pearce made of being asked to record lines about robots falling into a car crusher or being melted in a steelworks. The tournament mode was far better realised than in Metal Mayhem, and the competitor robots from the TV series were much better selected and unlocking them required a good bit of effort.

There is one curious thing about Arenas: one of the competitor robots had not yet appeared on television at the time the game was released! The game developers wanted to use Killerhurtz, but the team had a contract with the show's American counterpart, BattleBots, which prevented this, so they used Killerhurtz's successor Terrorhurtz instead, despite the fact it would be several months before that robot appeared in the TV series (indeed, Terrorhurtz had likely not even filmed its first TV appearance when the game was being developed and it could not even be guaranteed that it would ever appear onscreen).

At the same time as Arenas launched, a game for the Game Boy Advance was also released, this time with Tiertex nowhere to be seen: Advanced Destruction. Gameplay in this one could occasionally get a bit repetitive, as this YouTube video shows, but at least the graphics were a step up from Metal Mayhem.

Extreme Destruction was the name of the final game, released across three platforms another year on: the PC, XBox and Game Boy Advance, although the GBA version was totally distinct from the other two and only had the name in common. The GBA version was at least less repetitive than Advanced Destruction (although friend of the blog Dr. J. Wallace points out the game design was credited to "Strangely Brown", which may be a pseudonym or just an oddly named studio), whilst the PC/XBox version basically expanded on Arenas (recycling several of its arenas, games and CPU robots, as well as much of Jonathan Pearce's commentary, although it was still stuck with its predecessor's approach to showing damage -- indeed, there are a few scraps of code in the game left over from Arenas, indicating the first game was indeed used as a base), although the Robot Workshop arguably gave you fewer options than the previous game (not allowing you to choose what colour your robot was, for some reason), and the arcade mode was also a little lacking -- notably, the Football game did not bother to program the CPU robots to actually try and play football, and as a result they just treat it like a normal battle, which perhaps smacks of a lazy programmer wanting to get the game shipped on time.

So, there you have it: one completely dreadful game, and four that were at least playable. (There was also a board game, but I'm pretty sure I could get an entire book out of just trying to get my head around the rules to that...) The games do have a spiritual successor in the Robot Arena games, the second of which -- apart from boasting realistic physics and an extensive Robot Workshop which unlike the "official" games is not bound by any sort of template and allows you to do stuff like have saw blades for wheels or add another motor to your weapon to make it move faster -- has a downloadable Robot Wars mod which adds in dozens of robots and arenas from not only the TV show, but also the live circuit.