Running Commentary 12/21/2020
By: Derek Edwards
Tags: Battlebots, Star Wars, Mandalorian, Warframe, Birds

Warframe

DE had their 150th DevStream this week, which gave a look at Lavos, the latest warframe, as well as the upcoming Corpus expansion coming to railjack and the kingpin system. And before I was even able to get my thoughts on this out to you, Lavos has already arrived, as a reward for Operation Orphix Venom. Now, at time of writing, Lavos is building in my foundry, so I can’t give any thoughts on him until next time. The operation is pretty good. Granted, the event in most recent memory is Operation Scarlett Spear, so maybe I’m too easy on it. Orphix Venom is a bit grindy, but the mission is fun and unique and pretty low on crash-inducing bugs for an event.

The Corpus railjack stuff looks good from the preview, though I must say that, if you’re going to cut a part of the mission from the video for brevity’s sake, perhaps it would be wise to cut it from the game itself, if it’s that dull. The “Corpus Liches”, which I don’t think have gotten a proper name still, are a bit less exciting to me, mostly because I was hoping for upgraded Corpus weapons, as we got with the Grineer kingpins, and I can’t really tell if the briefcase guns will be any good. Hopefully so. The ephemera’s that will be coming as possible bonus rewards all looked really nice, though.

BattleBots

Our lesson in bot design this week is Make Sure Everything is Attached Securely. I’m really not sure what else to say after Gigabyte’s self-righting mechanism just fell off at the beginning of the fight. Not that it mattered much anyway, considering that copperhead was able to break Gigabyte apart later, earning the night’s most decisive victory.

Subzero vs. Jackpot was a mostly unmemorable fight.

Uppercut got the other big win of the night against Gemini, the double bot that had one member punted from the arena and the other blasted to pieces. Uppercut is a really underrated bot that has only lost twice, and one of those losses was to Bite Force.

Like last week, there was a very controversial judge's decision, but unlike last week, I don’t really agree with the way it went. The match was quite close, but Beta didn’t appreciably damage Rotator, and I would say that aggression should apply to attacking with intent to damage, not just shoving. Shoving is controlling, which is its own scoring category. Beta certainly dominated the fight, but they held back from hitting Rotator because they were afraid (rightly so) that any attack would lose them their weapon. They didn’t fight aggressively, they fought defensively.

Valkyrie, which is always a favorite of mine, won a narrow victory over Tantrum. One thing I did notice was that Valkyrie’s v-shaped body made it very easy to push it from behind weapon-first into walls. If I were Cushing and team, I’d be looking into ways to move the weapon from the outside of the tip of the v to the inside.

Most Impressive Rookie of the night goes to Big Dill, which made excellent use of a simple fork weapon against drum-spinner Atom #94.

The main bout of HyperShock vs. Gruff went about as I’d expect. I know I said a few weeks ago “don’t add a flamethrower”, but Gruff didn’t just add a flamethrower, it’s a bot very intentionally built around a flamethrower. It can actually throw heat hot enough and sustained enough to burn out its opponent. It is heavily armored against fuel tank punctures, and even without the flames, it’s a solid shove-bot. Against less-durable bots like HyperShock, it performs quite well.