Robots

In theme, and to a degree in gameplay, Choke On My Groundhog, You Bastard Robots (um, COMGYBR?) is an homage to Robotron. Robots have taken over the world, and you're going to take them on single-handed; there's no "last human family" to save, and shots aren't constrained to the four cardinal directions (thankfully -- WASD to move, aim with the mouse). Instead, there's time travel -- another recent indie game playing with that particular motif.

The backstory to Nanobots (select tutorial when you first play to see it) is that Groovy Greg, a hippie roboticist, has created the nanobots with the capacity to love, but they keep squabbling. Unless he can get them to work together, he'll get chucked out of grad school. His thesis advisor, Dr. Killfun, has also been working on the issue of robot love for decades and, upset by the possibility that his student will out-do him, will shortly return from his coffee break and smash the nanobots to bits, unless they can escape from Greg's tabletop.

Once upon a time, in the dim mists of prehistory, there was an Apple II game by Silas Marner called RobotWar, in which you programmed a robot warrior to fight AI bots, using a programming language quite similar to Apple Basic. The basic gameplay became C Robots, in which you code your bots in, naturally, C. Since then, there's been a whole geeky subculture of bot-coding games -- but since to code you need to be, well, a coder, the audience is inherently limited.

Spuds is, fundamentally, an attempt to take the RobotWar dyanamic, replace coding with a GUI to shape behavioral routines for your robots, and bolt on a single-player, level-based game that poses challenges of increasing difficulty, requiring you to develop new bot routines to address them. (You can also host a multiplayer game.)

First-rate indie developer Moonpod (of Starscape fame) brings us an excellent title that's an unusual but tasty combination of Sokoban-style puzzles and Final Fantasy-esque RPG.

You play Asimov, a repair robot in service to HEL-9000, the controlling computer of a generation ship that's carrying a cargo of frozen humans to another star via slower-than-light interstellar travel. As you might expect given HEL's name, he is gradually going nuts, and the whole journey is at risk--and it's up to you to rescue the ship and its human cargo.

Robotopia is a cheerful sidescrolling shooter with a color palette remniscent of the arcade, in which you control a robot who can fly, zapping a huge variety of opponents and bosses. The single-player game has scads of challenging levels (ten in the demo); you level up over time and can purchase new weapons and equipment, for an RPG-like experience. And once you've gotten good at the controls (see below), you can go online* and battle others in deathmatch, "capture-the-flag" or "bounty-hunting" play.

In GunMetal War Transformed, players suit up in the one and only Havoc suit, a power-armored vehicle that as "jet" or "robot" can fire tomahawk missiles from one or torpedoes from the other.

Fans of anime like Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, Macross Plus, and Full Metal Panic won't need an explanation for GunMetal: War Transformed, the PC version of a popular video game that will quickly remind non-fans of the old Transformers cartoon series or the anime-light Robotech series. The graphics are bright and colorful as you would expect in a "cartoon," but there is nothing cartoon-like about the action and the explosions. The 14 missions are designed to be roughly equivalent to the MechWarrior games, but as should be noted right from the beginning, this is not a "simulation" in the sense of MechWarrior or Heavy Gear with "realistic" physics, damage, and flight model. GunMetal doesn't bog down your enjoyment with "realistic" systems. It is a video game design and follows those conventions more than traditional PC considerations.

We don't normally link to advergames... But we're willing to make an exception for Junkbot, because we like it a lot.

Junkbot is a robot who works in a factory. His job is to empty garbage cans. Unfortunately, his programmers aren't too smart, and his pathing algorithms are dumb. He walks left-to-right until he hits an obstacle, then turns around and walks in the other direction. This would be okay, except that in most levels, something prevents him from getting to the garbage can. Your job is to build him a path--using Lego bricks (ah, the advertiser).

Victory Through Superior Programming

Once upon a time in the dim mists of history, when geeks wore pocket protectors and shivered in over-cooled machine rooms filled with mainframe computers, running racks of punch cards through readers and poring over accordion-folded printouts, Silas Marner wrote a game for Xerox PARC's PLATO computer system called RobotWar. And it was good.