RETRO REBOOT | Rise Of The Robots (3DO)

The mid-90's were the golden age of fighters, as the popularity of the genre was exploding. Following the runaway success of Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, there were so many studios pumping out tournament fighters, it made your head spin. More often than not, some of the offerings were better than given credit, but had difficult times breaking that glass ceiling into the mainstream. Then there's software like Rise of the Robots, one of the memes of the era that proves visuals aren't everything.

3DO was a fascinating console. I feel had it not been for the insanely high retail price of $699.99 (adjusting for inflation, that would be the equivalent of dropping about $1,500.00 today), it might've seen a stronger run of major market appeal. There was definitely fascinating software for it, but it remained elusive for me, as there was no way I would've been able to talk my parents into plunking down a fortune for a new platform, much less support a library of games for it.

Rise of the Robots was probably the first 3DO game I ever played, and I recall the publications giving it a lot of praise for being a technical marvel prior to release. The game was developed by five people, including Sean Griffiths, former staffer from Bitmap Brothers (The Chaos Engine: Soldiers of Fortune), so there was talent behind the concept. Problem is, crafting a fighting game was uncharted territory.

There is a good deal of horsepower that's thrown into the soup of RotR. The work done on the rendered models is certainly stunning, even the Super Nintendo port looks great for what it is, even including the pre-fight cut sequences (though they look like they were placed in a blender and set on puree). The downside is, this leads to incredibly sluggish and borderline unresponsive controls, piss poor collision detection, and a limited moveset that fails to impress. Like Shaq-Fu, this engine does feel like it suits a fighting game.

Then there's the roster; for a single player experience, you can only play as the main character ECO35-2 Cyborg. Despite being humanoid, it doesn't move any faster or with any more fluidity than the other machines you battle. The other bots (like the cleverly named Prime-8) look alright, but there's little else to them. Wanna face a buddy in 2-player versus? Player 1 is only stuck using ECO35, while Player 2 can select from the Five Below line-up of reject action figures. Chances are, you're not going to get much out of Rise as even a game to mess around with while drinking beers with your friends. Unless you have a lot of beer.

At least the music production is pretty great, the lone standout quality from this shit. Queen's league guitarist Brian May features two of his tracks from his solo album "Resurrection" and "The Dark", and it sounds hella good. The rest of the music is produced by the late composer Richard Joseph, whose career spanned two decades in video game music production, up to his passing in 2007. Rise of the Robots certainly embodies a haunting, dystopian atmosphere, where everything is completely automated, as mankind is dependant on machines......this suddenly got very real, and very dark. The metal clanking sound effects aren't too bad either.

Rise of the Robots remains one of the most hideous fighting games, not just of the 90's, but in general. Off the top of my head, there are some that are considerably worse 90's fighter out there (Karate Champ, SNES Pit-Fighter, Kasumi Ninja, and Brutal: Paws of Fury, just to name a few), but this is a teachable moment to highlight that it takes way more than super high production values to make your tournament fighter appealing. Even by '94, there was a degree of standards and a baseline for quality.

The roster is terrible. Normal attacks don't land with any kind of weight or cohesion. Special attacks are not only a pain to pull off, but are executed with zero flare or pomp. The collision detection is a joke. Anything resembling a story is non-existent. It's not even awful enough to end up in the "so bad, it's good" territory.