The Stack

Robotron X is not a greatly redesigned adaptation, like Frogger (1997) or Combat (2001). It plays basically like the coin-op arcade game: you run around frantically on a rectangular playfield, shooting in eight directions, while robotrons of various sorts chase you. Your goal on each board is to clear it of all enemies other than the indestructible Hulk robotrons. Various members of the Last Human Family mosey around, oblivious to danger, and you can eat them for points.

The most obvious differences from the original are cosmetic ones: everything’s modeled in 3D, there’s a pulse-pounding techno soundtrack (in CD-audio format!), there’s a fourth Last Human Family member (an old man, presumably Mikey’s grandpa), and various of the robotrons look very different from their 2D counterparts. Hulks were, in the original game, rectangular slabs with legs and a tiny head; here, they’re less exaggerated and more humanoid, which kind of ruins them if you ask me. I guess the developers thought the original design was too silly, but that’s what made it awesome. Spheroids and Quarks, the carriers that emit Enforcers and Tanks respectively, always seemed sort of wispy and insubstantial in the original, like they were made of energy or just warped space rather than physical matter. Here, they’re definitely physical. Spheroids look like flying saucers, and Quarks are just cubes with a texture pasted on. Here, though, I’m more inclined to blame the graphics engine than the developers’ design sense. Everything’s made of textured polygons. You can only get so wispy with that stuff. A proper Spheroid or Quark would be made of particle effects or something. Similarly, the original appearance of the sinister Progs was kind of intrinsically pixel-based, and so Robotron X just makes up something completely new for them, a sort of glowing stick figure.

As for changes to gameplay, I’ve already mentioned that there are powerups and a finite set of levels with victory at the end. The powerups appear at random, and they’re pretty basic: shields, three-way fire, etc. You can get extra lives from powerups, which strikes me as a pretty significant change. In the original game, the only way to get extra lives was from scoring points, and the biggest source of points was the Last Human Family. As a result, going after the humans was generally your top priority. But when there are extra-life powerups, they take priority over that.

The original game had a pretty small roster of enemies: Grunts, Hulks, Brains that create Progs, Spheroids that create Enforcers, Quarks that produce Tanks. The manual for Robotron X tells me that there’s one completely new enemy, the Byte robotron, but I haven’t seen it yet. How does it create 200 levels of variety and increasing difficulty, then? By giving you increasingly powerful variations of the basic ones. Every one of the original robotrons comes in four varieties, with later versions being faster or taking more hits to kill or having special abilities. For example, level 2 Enforcers can lay mines. Level 2 Grunts have jetpacks, which seems wrong to me: according to the attract screen of the original game, “GRUNT” stands for “Ground Roving Unit Network Terminator”, and any unit with a jetpack is not ground roving. Level 2 Hulks are red, which, coupled with their more-humanoid design, makes them way too easy to mistake for Grunts. It’s an unending problem for game design: there just aren’t enough easily-distinguishable colors. Also, it’s a little weird how the system is based on the idea that the original robotrons are basic elementary types. I mean, really the original game already had a harder variant of the Enforcer. It was called the Tank. But X has to pretend that Enforcer and Tank are two completely different species.

But if you ask me, the most significant change is this: The robotrons don’t all appear at once. They come in waves, more teleporting in periodically as you clear the level. It’s not clear to me if waves are timed or of they’re triggered by progress, but either way, the effect is to keep you on your toes. You can no longer rely on the Grunts to all cluster together in a big pack that you can run circles around, because there will be more spawning in front of you. I think this is probably to the game’s benefit on the whole, but it can get a little exasperating when you think you’re on the verge of winning a level and all of the sudden another wave of robotrons appears and stretches things out.