From: dylan@cs.washington.edu (Dylan McNamee)
Subject: Maxis' RoboSport for the Amiga is out...
Summary: Hooray!
Keywords: hd-installable, os friendly, good game
Organization: Computer Science & Engineering, U. of Washington, Seattle
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 92 15:10:57 GMT


I bought Maxis' latest game, RoboSport, two days ago.  Here's my first
impression;  

It's _extremely_ os friendly--it happily coexists with my other 30
programs, on a screen of its own, without hogging CPU cycles, installed
on my hard drive (manual protection) and hasn't crashed in two days of 
running.  Good job, Maxis...

It shows Maxis-style;  good and funny manual, open-ended "toy" rather than
closed world fixed-play, etc.

Here's the idea;

There are 2-4 teams on a board, each team starting out in one of the board's
four corners.  Teams consist of robots, which duke it out as per your
program.  Each team can be set up to be programmed by a human, or the 
computer, and the game supports remote link, either directly or over a modem
to any other machine that can run the game.  (They even support CBM's 
TCP/IP board.)  

Games progress in "turns"; each team programming its robots for an execution
time of up to 40 seconds.  After the programming phase, the computer plays
out the programs, calculating what transpired over the turn's duration.
The players are then presented with a "VCR" of the turn, which they can
play, pause, rewind, etc, all while looking at various parts of the board.
Then, the programming, etc process is repeated.

Scenarious include different objectives, like Survival (kill or be killed)
Hostage (keep one of your opponents teammates, and fetch your teammate from
their territory), Capture the Flag, Treasure Hunt, and "Baseball".  
If you're playing against the computer, it can be Stupid, Fierce 
(shoot all that moves), Crafty, or Home Only.  The game's duration is tied
to the board size.  Short games fill a HiRes screen (As with SimAnt, there 
is a Hi and Lo res version of the game.)  Other game lengths, Melee,
Battle and Campaign increase the board size to approximately 4 Hi-res screens.

Three types of arenas are "rubble", "suburbs" and "computer".  

Various team compositions give the robots different weapons and abilities,
such as being invisible, unless moving, etc.  

Programming specifies where the robots go, where they scan, and when/where
to shoot.  It is not a procedural language--nor does it have conditional
branches.  The robots are the drones, you are the general.  In this sense
it is a bit like "robot chess", more than, say CRobots.

All in all, I'm really pleased with the operation of the game.  It is well
done, and "deep".  The game offers more challenge than is apparent at
first (or second) glance.  I was a bit disappointed that the programming
isn't more like CRobots, but once I got used to the "chess-ness" of it,
I didn't mind so much.  I think it would be neat to allow "autonomous" agents
into the game, if only as a diversion.

All in all, Hooray!  I personally think this is more fun than SimEarth
was (played it on my A-Max, stopped after 2 days) but we'll see how it
stacks up to SimCity in the long-run.

dylan
      /L      dylan mcnamee		dylan@cs.washington.edu
     /  L    
   (o)   L   "Don't look at me...I didn't do it!"  K. T. Clown.
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