From: poirier@ellerbe.rtp.dg.com (Charles Poirier)
Subject: Re: Looking for Robosport Review
Summary: Look no further, here it is
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 92 23:43:40 GMT
Organization: Data General Corporation, RTP, NC.
Keywords: Robosport
Followup-To: rec.games.misc

In article <1992Jul20.171654.936@cci632.cci.com> lmm@cci632.cci.com (Lance Michel) writes:
>Has anyone purchased Robosport from MAXIS yet?

I've been playing the Amiga version of Robosport for a couple of weeks;
here's a review.

Each player (up to four) controls a team of up to eight robots.  The players
can be any combination of human and computer; computer opponents have
four different "personalities" to choose from.  The teams of robots
compete in one of six "sports".  Survival is the basic sport, where
you try to kill all the other robots.  The other sports are variations on
survival: treasure hunt, capture the flag, hostage, beat the clock, and
baseball.  

Basically you have a time slice (user-selectable) of simulated time to fill
with instructions to your robots.  The "program" is very easy to create:
you click to move your robot to a new position (it auto-routes, albeit badly);
shift-click to change facing; and click on various icons for changing stance,
changing weapons, and firing them.  As you create the "program" for each
robot, a row of icons appears on-screen showing in detail the robot's
actions: say you click once to move your robot four spaces, it displays
four small arrows (or maybe two big arrows if the robot is in its tall stance)
plus the current time at that stage of the robot's turn.  You can easily
backspace through the list to erase mistakes.  All actions take
a known amount of time.  As you program, the robot moves, along with any
other robots of yours already programmed - so you can see where the robots
will be in relation to each other at any time.  The enemy robots, of course,
are not moved while you program.  Since you won't know where the enemy will
be exactly, most firing is scan-and-fire for a desired period of time.
You can also ask for single shots at locations within line of sight, even
though no enemy is there; useful for the odd speculative grenade or missile
blast in front of a hole in the wall, or for flushing out "stealth"s.

When all the human players' robots have been programmed, the computer
compiles the results of all teams in the form of a "movie" of that time
slice.  This is a really nice feature of the program.  The controls are
much like a VCR in that you can play, rewind, play in reverse, and slo-mo.
You can see the action from the point of view of one team, or you can
choose to show all units.  You see and hear the robots hop around,
fire, scream, and gloat.  The arena can be scrolled around during playback.
It can be set to track any robot you can see as the "star", keeping it
centered; or not.

After all human players have viewed the movie, you go to the next time slice
and program your surviving robots' next turn, generate the next piece of
movie, and so on until only one team survives (or the time limit, if set,
runs out, or the score limit, if set, is reached, or all the bases are
tagged, etc.).

There are arenas of eight sizes in each of three styles: suburbs, rubble,
and "computer" (printed circuit board stuff).  There are bushes, hydrants,
curbs, rubble, walls, and so forth which constitute terrain features the
robots must deal with.  Most robots have a single main weapon (missile
robots also have a backup rifle for when they run out of missiles), plus
maybe grenades, plus maybe a "zap" (adjacent only), plus maybe one bomb
per team, plus...  Not too complicated, really.  There about a zillion
preset scenarios (i.e. team compositions, arena, sport, time limits,
sighting rules, amount of grenades/missiles, etc).  Plus, you have access
to a full customization screen for designing your own.  In fact, you can
save the scenarios you design.  Each type of robot (auto, burst, rifle,
missile, stealth) has its own rate of fire, its own armor rating, also
its own "quality" rating which is useful for comparing team designs.

You have the option of saving the entire game on disk as a full-length
movie.  Included is a separate Roboplayer program with which you can
regenerate the game and view the movie in its entirety, rather than in
N-second chunks.

The game plays pretty quickly: under 1 hour for the largest 1-human game.
It is a snap to learn the controls.  As a wargame it's kind of lightweight,
as compared to, say, Perfect General; I find it entertaining anyway.  You
get to see lots of amusing situations due to there being no active
intelligence during the time slice.  For example: I and the computer are
sitting crouched in bushes (good cover) firing away at each other
ineffectually.  Then the computer robot, having fired for as long as he
thought he needed, stands up, turns his back, and backs up right into my
guns!  Score one "ARRGH" for the good guys.

The user interface is superb.  The implementation, barring one incident of
a minor display glitch, seems bug-free.  The automated opponents (barring
the one named "stupid"), while not particularly hard to beat, are not to
be taken for granted either.  The Amiga version comes with two versions:
low-res and high-res.  The latter permits four times as much area to show
on-screen at once and, for the smaller skirmish games, shows the whole
arena at once, which is very nice.  I don't know about the other platforms.

Manual-based protection.  Hard diskable.  AmigaOS-friendly, multitasks.
Supports modem and local network play.  Two to four teams can play alone
or as sides (1-on-1, 2-on-2, 1-on-3, 1-on-1-on-2 etc).

Ratings on a scale of 1-10:

    Interface		10
    Implementation	10
    Documentation	10
    System-friendly	10
    Game play		 6
    Graphics		 7
    Sound		 5
    Automated opponents	 8 (as these things go)

	Cheers,
	Charles Poirier