Lies of the Robots

[@ModernVintageGamer]

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[@5rv9KY]

Shadps4 is making a good progress.

[@AdaptiveSystems]

deleteme sounds great, until you realise at one point it will get sold to random shareholders, who then sell your data back to those same websites.

[@jiijijjijiijiij]

Maybe you should look into some ads for proofreaders. The writing in the scripts for your videos is so stilted and full of grammatical errors that it feels like I'm listening to a D student read his book report. It's so bad that I can barely even make it through your videos sometimes. You desperately need to find someone who can be honest with you and tell you how to fix your scripts to make them sound natural.

[@jaxkthereaper6569]

I'm glad to see that some people out here aren't as dumb as others. ​@@AdaptiveSystems

[@yuho865]

please don't take money from this scam company

[@nearvanaman]

This video was longer than anyone has actually spent playing "Rise of the Robots"

[@linuxforpunks]

but not longer than anyone has actually spent waiting for "Rise of the Robots" to load :)

[@tristramcox4615]

Some poor kid asked for it for Christmas and convinced themselves it was worth it. I remember playing it on my uncles CD32 and being wowed. Poor foolish me

[@marlowepi7788]

wtf, no joke: i came to this video here from a video about the game rise of the robots!! directly, 5 seconds ago.

[@Qlicky]

I've played this game at launch. Even then it was obvious that fancy graphics only get you so far.

[@zerwif]

I rented the game around 1995 after having tried most of Blockbuster's existing library. I played it for maybe one or two hours total. Not being able to select characters was one the biggest oddities right off the bat.

[@sonoftheredfox]

"It's also fully playable in MAME if you want to take a look"

[@Tarodenaro]

"Press B for Brian May" feels like a modern sh*tposting and not something you should add in main menu lol 😂

[@garystinten9339]

Two of the four have been delivered in the prophecy. X to Doubt B to Brian.

[@alizardincrimson]

You forgot "F" to Pay Respects.

[@redpheonix1000]

Press X to Jason

[@garystinten9339]

@@redpheonix1000 where was that for established lore?

[@EmArgh]

I couldn't stop laughing

[@ViniVHSoares1993]

Quite disappointed that many games ask me if i want to play in English or Japanese, but never ask if i want to play it in Brian May.

[@fernie-fernandez]

Imagine playing this in Canada…or Scott The Woz.

[@tristramcox4615]

That's because the answer is always yes 😂

[@casedistorted]

No clue who Brian May was growing up lol so that wasn't a good selling point for me as a kid.

[@dervwfahrer]

I remember when the neighbor's 10-year-old son begged me to play this game with him. He had gotten it as a Christmas present and had no one to fight with. (I was much older then, 16-17).. It took 3-4 rounds before I got annoyed because he pinned me to the corner of the map several times and knocked me out. He was laughing and having fun, so I gave him another 5 minutes (I pretended to fight for my life) until I gave up. When I turned around my first thought was, “What a piece of gaming shit.”

[@tarheels100]

Sure, blame it on the game. 😉

[@Maxrepfitgm]

​@@tarheels100lol 😆 😂 🤣

[@dabadoo7631]

obviously it was the 3rd party controller that was at fault 😂

[@JelloFluoride]

LOL was this me? I had this awful game and I lived in Northwest Indiana.

[@MKinney]

Sounds like purely outplayed.

[@Jimalcoatl]

Imagine the alternate reality where Rise of the Robots was good and became a huge hit. Everyone walking around in RotR merch and kids playing professional Rise of the Robots 6 at EVO.

[@LordArikado]

And in this splintered timeline, Rise of the Robots makes the transition to full 3D around the end of the 5th generation/beginning of the 6th. People are still split in 2024 about whether that was where the series jumped the shark, or if that's where it found its footing after some shaky sequels to the original classic.

[@alfstewart22]

Not gonna lie, buying RotR (SNES) for $99 AUD at Myer Chadstone back in the day really really hurt. That was 2 months of paper runs.

[@animaze8043]

I am born in 1987. This game was the game my uncle pushed all my gift money towards. He snuffed at Street Fighter Alpha 3 that i was going to buy. Never wasted money on games again lol.

[@sambas9257]

I tried a pirated copy from one of my friends in the late 90s for Amiga. So game was free for me but I had to use 10 blank floppy's as support. Even the cheapest ones were 1 dollar each one. At least you had the package and manual as memory. I regret so much my 10 dollars for those floppies...

[@dreamcazman]

Thankfully never made the mistake of buying this turd. I had a Mega Drive and always checked the reviews before buying, SF2: SCE was like $130 IIRC.

[@dillonandon]

A friend of mine got the SNES version (at his parents' great expense I imagine) and he invited me over to play it. I have no idea how I managed to pretend that I was having fun playing that crap for hours.

[@dsdgdsfegfeg]

​​@@dreamcazman I think ST2 Turbo was like $130 in NZ back then. I always ignored ROTR, I always thought it looked dumb.

[@puggawompy]

I bought this game back in the day, excitedly rushed home to install and play it... I spent a few hours "playing it" and thought "there's something wrong with me... I'm not enjoying it, I must be playing it wrong or something..." I am so glad you did this retrospective expose on it after all these decades, now it all makes sense, I was thinking with my lust... not my brain. In the end it was a rudimentary early Streetfighter clone with high school student made ray-traced robot skins and the fattest promise not delivered.

[@electricindigoball1244]

3:20 "Games media had broken the trust of their customers" It's a good thing they learned from this mistake and never repeated it. /s

[@malevolentia28]

it's really cool that they never repeat it every week on the calendar, whew, we are so lucky

[@brianisprettycool]

I heard the new Call of duty is gonna have guns

[@jeremygalloway1348]

rotr Was the original test run...

[@locust76]

These days, games media journalists will just call everyone racists, homophobes and mysoginists for criticizing them.

[@SkynetCyb]

Being a game journalist sucks, you have to balance media relations with also giving your opinion and gamers are never happy anyway. I wouldn't want to be one.

[@ThisSteveGuy]

Mirage really was the perfect name for the company.

[@metacob]

My parents weren't super stoked about me getting a SNES as a kid. But my mom cared about me not getting disappointed when video game prices meant that I didn't have many more opportunities for getting new games other than birthdays and christmases. She got a tip from another mom about a magazine that didn't pull any punches in their reviews (for any Germans here: it was called 'Total!'), and that pretty much saved me from turds like this. I got most of the classics during the SNES era, and any time I went ahead and got an average-rated game anyway I regretted it.

[@Isaac________]

Total! was my favorite magazine. It didn't just influence me heavily as a gamer, but I believe it had a large influence on my type of humor. I was devastated when they suddenly stopped releasing it (with the two weird Tekken specials as last releases).

[@iraito8356]

Based mom

[@tatenaibenbusi]

I loved Total! And I loved the cover of Rise of the Robots and always wanted to rent it

[@MrDazzlerdarren]

I had every copy of Total! ...got chucked in a skip when I lost my house in 2010 along with an loads of Amiga Formats and an A1200 and 100s of games :-( ...so if you live near Newark UK and fancy a dig around, they're there somewhere! 😀

[@macrozone]

Aah the good old Total!

[@fionaskittle]

"press B for Brian May" is honestly one of the funniest things I never knew about RotR so thanks for that! 😂 God the marketing for this game was fucking everywhere at the time, so embarrassing when it eventually released. I always thought it looked really boring and clinical, like, I know it's robots but I always thought it looked lifeless literally and figuratively. So glad even younger me didn't buy in to it.

[@decoyfox]

I remember seeing this in a game shop display, begged my dad to buy it, he refused. Got me SF2 turbo instead - he always was a smart guy

[@PenguinDT]

In 1994 CVG (Computer and Video Games, one of the biggest gaming magazines of the era) scored this turd higher than DOOM II. And thus at the age 11 I stopped giving a crap about review scores.

[@Donscottgaming]

As a 40 year old, I remember that well. They praised and hyped this game to no end.

[@buckjones4901]

@@Donscottgaming Sounds like they got paid off to do that. No honest person could rank this game as anything but trash.

[@zakhoskins6404]

I still remember watching Extended Play give Morrowing a 3/5, and Sessler is such a punk you can't even find the review online now. Never trust a man with frosted tips.

[@OSW]

1:57 "the game was absolute garbage. here's how many times i bought it"! i love gamers

[@lpjunior999]

Kinda want to read that novel, thicker than I’d imagine.

[@EmArgh]

@@lpjunior999 how many times can you embellish a shit game. AUTHOR: Yes.

[@jaro6985]

You only have yourself to blame.

[@Iliek]

Oh, me? Just compulsively filling my house with garbage!

[@kil-md7on]

Hm.... You don't get it at all. "gamers" ? ... We are on a retro gaming channel which regulary make content about unusual stuff. Having an N-Gage an all his games is fabulous dispite the fact every single of them is terrible, and I could watch a 3h video about N-Gage history. That's the spirit, this is not a normie channel.

[@ElDaumo]

I remember beating the whole game with simply spamming crouch-kick. One of my childhood friends had paid for a copy and those were expensive back than. We sat there all excited and the disappointment following rolling credits after 40 minutes of cheese was immeasurable

[@ketchupkatsup9805]

0:45 has to be one of the greatest edits of all time. Terrific timing 😂😂👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

[@MartinBgelund]

"I'm gonna spill your pneumatic fluids"? Wouldn't that be "hydraulic fluids"?

[@cloroc]

Correct

[@deedoubs]

People need to talk more about OMF2097 whenever Rise of the Robots is mentioned. Both games came out at a similar time with a similar approach to theme and art... but one kicks ass and the other is Rise of the Robots.

[@facenameple4604]

OMF2097 is legitimately one of the best fighting games ever made. Bar None. If they took everything from it, and just modernized the graphics, it would still be one of the best fighting games now. If they actually modernized the full game as a 2d fighter(that 3d arena garbage does not count), it would legitimately be the best game ever. It had so many secrets and so many secret fights, just to start with. At a time when all of that stuff was not common. #1 fighting game of the time

[@tehshingen]

Omf2097 is in fact 2097 times better than Rise

[@alhuno1]

The Gravis Ultrasound version of OMF2097's intro is one of the best video game songs of the DOS era in my opinion.

[@michaelturner2806]

I had so many, many hours poured into just the free shareware version of omf2097. I couldn't find it in stores, and parents didn't trust mail order.

[@lasskinn474]

yes exactly! technically everything on pc was in place to make an AWESOME robot fighting game with pre rendered graphics but the RoR guys lacked vision. a lot of the RoR seems like it was forced. like, need some background renders? well hire an architecht! instead of just having some dude come up with some interesting backgrounds

[@PeteDabbs]

I had the dubious pleasure of coding the CD-i version. The game was pretty much complete when I started. I have stories and insights...

[@jeffsymons7084]

Go on then...

[@RyansAlwaysEaton]

@ModernVintageGamer have you seen this?

[@samplerInfo]

If you really did that, please share! Perhaps do it like a QnA? Anyway, it'd be a great episode here or on any of the serious retro channels🙏

[@JamesChatting]

Cool story, bro 😎👍🏻

[@AJediSurvivor]

Yeah? Doubt it

[@itstheterranaut]

I was a regular reader of 'Edge' here in the UK around about that time, who had the semi-regular dev diary series of articles about it that you mention. I wasn't much of a fan of beat-em-ups but enjoyed the updates on the tech. The fall from grace was startling, tbf Edge nailed the review completely and 2/10 was completely fair.

[@happyspaceinvader508]

Yeah, I suspect the Digital Foundry retro on this game has been vetoed. 😂

[@MechMK1]

I genuinely hate Edge's "nonpology", claiming they were duped. It was their damn job to be critical, to get facts and not fall for PR hype. In their apology, they shift away all blame and admit they were merely a PR mouthpiece.

[@glitchhunter09]

Some things with gaming journalism just never change do they?

[@MechMK1]

@@glitchhunter09 That's mostly due to how gaming journalism is structured these days. It's a sort of "entry point" to journalism, meaning a sizeable chunk of games journalists don't actually care about video games and see it as an obstacle towards their "real journalism" career.

[@arostwocents]

Watch the clip of Bad Influence on RoseTintedSpectrum where they are showing a preview while talking about how great it will be, but if you watch the footage the game is obviously absolutely dire. There is no excuse for the way the media got tricked. It should have been obvious it was going to be nowhere near as good as One Must Fall 2097 at a very early stage. The graphics aren't even that much better than OMF while just from the features the game had and what was promised, it was clear it could never be as good a game as OMF.

[@arostwocents]

​@@MechMK1exactly - people are going into it to push their woke racism ideology rather than out of a love of gaming, as in the old days. It shows how much demanding people have a degree, locking out most of the working class has ruined everything 😢

[@arostwocents]

​@@MechMK1gaming journalists today see it as an avenue to push their woke ideology rather than to talk about their love of games. They literally love woke, not games. They care about representation, not fun. It's tragic and another example of why needing a degree for basic jobs is the opposite of diversity, as on the inside everyone has the same ideology.

[@WarriorTier]

I remember being at Comp USA as a seven-year-old playing a demo of an old games called “Wolf” which was really cool. A Long haired teenager who worked there came over and said “do you want to see a game that’s better than X-wing”? He proceeded to launch rise of the robots, I remember being not impressed.

[@liukang85]

"better than X Wing" 💀💀💀💀

[@HistoricaHungarica]

Cool old game named "Wolf"? I need more information.

[@BackForwardPunch]

Mirage is such a fitting name for a company making a game that looks nice from afar but up close it falls apart

[@cyphaborg6598]

lol good one.

[@Aragorn7884]

The marketing for this was insane for it's era...I remember

[@jothain]

Indeed. Few gaming magazines I read had tons of adverts for this for like year before launch already and they were in every single issue of them. Can't recall anything, absolutely anything to have even near that much hype. Maybe Atari Jaguar, but it didn't last very long. Marketing campaign for rotr had to be insanely expensive

[@Linuxpunk81]

And if you couldn't see right through it then I'm sorry

[@jonbourgoin182]

The Internet wasnt widespread yet. The marketing dept could get away with fake screenshots and marketing blurbs and make any game look like a worthy investment easily...the internet, for all of its faults, does allow us to seek out immediate opinions on the quality of modern software

[@edturner9670]

​@Linuxpunk81 There's a little detail here that I think you might be missing which this video didn't really cover. Besides all the hype and previews that gaming magazines were churning out before anyone actually had the chance to play it, there were some very "suspect" gaming reviews, some of which were noted on the box itself. My recollections of this were quite good but I've just double checked by looking at a copy of box packaging online and I remembered this very quote (check for yourself): "You'll wish all your games were this good." - PC Power, Nov 1994, 93% - Now what does that tell you? It tells me that some of the reviewers were bought out. Maybe you're getting a different answer. You should read the rest of the crap from the magazine quotes. Here's another: "Technically this is probably the most advanced game ever." - C&CV, Nov 1994, 90% - It doesn't quite add up does it when the game was truly that dreadful? If mainstream game reviewers tried that kind of thing now, they would get absolutely crucified and blacklisted. Then throw in the unparalleled advertising campaign and as another poster commented, limited access to a rudimentary Internet. I was a young kid at the time and got totally swept up as many did in the complete BS.

[@MLennholm]

This game taught me that some magazines don't exist for information but are pure marketing disguised as journalism. I was a member of some Nintendo club (official or not, I don't remember) that used to send this monthly magazine (more like a pamphlet really) showing off new and upcoming releases for the SNES. It hyped this game up immensely and ended its "review" with the sentence "What are you waiting for? Get out there and buy this game!". I didn't, fortunately. A few days later that month's issue of Nintendo Power showed up and they completely savaged the game. That's when I learned that just because something is claimed in print doesn't mean it's trustworthy... (give me a break, I was just a kid)

[@user-vi4xy1jw7e]

Ironically, Nintendo Power tended to go pretty easy on a lot of games.

[@Pikmin012]

"Games media had broken the trust of their customers. And it would take years to repair this damage." LMAO

[@erdemmemisyazici3950]

It's the worst idea. Only good for a quick buck, then everyone forgets whatever you were pushing.

[@WWammyy]

No I know trusted magazine reviews. Everyone looked at the back of the box and read the description to decide if the game is something they would like. Word of mouth for the hottest games + borrowing games was the top method. But magazines were just to see what was available no one trusted their reviews to be accurate.

[@kudosbudo]

@@WWammyy "Word of mouth for the hottest games + borrowing games was the top method." And even that isn't realiable. The number of games folk have raved to me that i have basically wasted money on is quite a lot now. I think the worst one was that Republic Commando game. So many folk recommende dthat game to me sayign it was teh best FPS game ever. As somebody who largely played FPS games from many systems i can say it was one of the worst and i can only assume the kids were blinded by nostalgia. Freedom Fighters on the PS2 basically does the same concept better with less stilted controls, less brown and beige and less boring weapons and enemies. Honestly it was so bad i really thought i had got the wrong game. Folk were saying its as good as GoldenEYE or Perfect Dark or even Quake or Doom. And it doesn't even come close. The second worst FPS game i ever played was Rise of the Triad. And that game is awesome. More recently folk calling the Boltgun 40k game a boomer shooter hoodwinked me into a really bad cover simulator game. At higher difficulties yoru typical dodge left and right circle trafing just doens't work due to lack of room in teh tiny arenas or enemies that as super accurate. Many games just dont' live up to the hype when even the standards of some folk is so low. I really only trust myself now. I don't get hyped til i try the game and if its crap out the door it gets binned immediately.

[@nakedbeekeeper9610]

​@@WWammyy Tbh it all depended on your local scene. Where I grew up there were no rental businesses and it was hard to find gamers around. I remember in my middle school only three kids played games. Magazines were the only info source available for me.

[@robertbernard7844]

"And it would take years to repair this damage." Wait, it's been repaired? I thought it's still under development. Much like most AAA games today.

[@JMDurden]

"Games Media had broken the trust of their customers and it would take years to repair this damage." It's been repaired?

[@Black_Revue]

They NEVER did

[@xtieburn]

Im glad I was getting my robot fighting fix from One Must Fall 2097 instead.

[@wallylim516]

I learned a big lesson after buying and playing this game: DO NOT FALL FOR COOL GRAPHICS > This game was a complete waste of money

[@kosmosyche]

"It was just a product of it's time, mate!" is such a weird non-argument. I mean, yes, it sure was, but so were Doom, Donkey Kong Country, Warcraft, Myst, Cannon Fodder and numerous other games that came out around that time that were actually excellent.

[@MegaZeta]

What’s odd to me is the people who don’t understand that most video games, in any decade, were middling to bad.

[@kosmosyche]

@@MegaZeta That's true, of course. Still the "product of it's time" feels like something you would say about a game that wasn't perceived bad in the context of the time of it's release. That's not nearly the case here. I can say that Night Trap was a product of it's time. Yes, it wasn't a particularly good game, but it was all FMVs (state of the art back then) and was viewed as fairly entertaining. 7th Guest was a "product of it's time". The game was full of really well made prerendered 3D scenes and animations with lots of FMVs on top. This was something interesting and new back then, something that showed the power of CD-ROM and multimedia. People loved that stuff (including me). But Rise of the Robots was just a really bad and boring fighting game, there was nothing else to it, no redeeming qualities whatsoever, nothing that could help enjoy it even at the time. So that's why "product of it's time" argument doesn't work in this case.

[@Tigrou7777]

One Must Fall 2097 was also a product of it's time but was waaaaaaaaaay better (and probably cheaper as well).

[@OrgaNik_Music]

@@Tigrou7777 I keep confusing these two games for some reason

[@markvicferrer]

If Peter Molyneux was involved, he'd claim that each robot would be able to have meaningful conversations with you or something.

[@Noxedwin]

24:31 - "Tightening up the graphics on Level 3" is such an infamous, godlike phrase. This game really was a meme, huh?

[@boredbastardbullshit]

Can't believe he hit us with that, lol

[@LaPollaAtomica]

Source seems to be an interview printed in The One Amiga saying they were "perfecting the graphics," so it looks like MVG being cheeky. The meme itself is from an early-00's Westwood College ad that used to run quite a bit. ROTR has given us much confusion and joy but that phrase is not part of it.

[@EmArgh]

Ah man this video has me dying. This statement, then "It's bad, real bad"... but, 26:28 is the icing "Press B for Brian May"

[@5roundsrapid263]

Westwood and Collins College! 😂

[@nrok113]

just gotta get your super nintendo controller and tighten them up

[@NowhereNarrative]

From the Amiga Power review, written by Jonathan Davies: Even if you don't believe in Father Christmas, it might be worth writing to him to make sure he doesn't bring you a copy of this. 5% Their earlier preview actually points out that whilst the game looks good, they're suspicious of the lack of gameplay demos. AP wins again!

[@AmigaA-or2hj]

I still remember that review.

[@arcadeguy2142]

As a kid I wanted this so bad! My Dad surprised me with that game. It was extreme expensive (179 DM Germany, nowadays that would be 90 EUR!). Man I was so disappointed. Gameplay was so bad :(

[@dmer-zy3rb]

Propably more than 90€ to be honest. That's crazy, no wonder piracy was popular on computers even back then.

[@kdkdkdkdkdkdkdkdkdkdkd]

Bless your dad, though.

[@tychosis]

Yeah, I remember buying this when I first upgraded my PC to something resembling decent gaming standards. So disappointing. The Brian May riffs at the beginning get you all hyped and then it's all downhill from there. (I do think I got a free RotR t-shirt with it though, I wish I still had it.)

[@Falc0re]

Assuming 2% inflation rate p.a. your dad paid an equal of todays buying power of 169,09 Euro. This hits hard.

[@arcadeguy2142]

@@Falc0re Indeed

[@SteveBennet500]

I saw this game at my local computer store that rented out pc games(lolol) and it peaked my interest. When i managed to get it running on my computer at 800x600 i was blown away how beautiful it looked, all my other games were either running at 320x240 or maybe 640x480 but this thing ran at 800x600 and had those beautiful rendered graphics, never seen anything like that before. I focused more on the scenery at first than fighting, eventually i started playing the game and oh man what a stinker. Went back to playing One Must Fall 2097 and that was that, now that was a fighting game done right on the pc.

[@martinjohnson2381]

Piqued* must be the most misspelled word online.

[@therealavolpe]

​@@martinjohnson2381 😅

[@charliefoxglove4471]

Hey Dimitris FYI to "throw caution to the wind" means to have no caution, so Amiga Power (as always) was the only mag to *not* throw caution to the wind! Also gotta love that "I'm gonna spill your pneumatic fluids" quote at the end, it really is the cherry on top that the devs didn't know the difference between pneumatics and hydraulics!

[@ahhuhtal]

Air is technically a fluid :-). Not sure how you would spill it though.

[@Finnisher_DAD]

Was about to post the same 😂 Maybe they should of hired an engineer too

[@kri249]

They should also learn the difference between a cyborg and a robot 😂

[@joe--cool]

I always thought it meant doing something dangerous while being aware of and despite the high risk.

[@rtyuik7]

​@@joe--coolin other words, "with no caution"...because it had been thrown to the wind already

[@EmArgh]

26:28 Fucking hell I died. "PRESS B FOR BRIAN MAY" 😅

[@ProtoMario]

My uncle bought this game for me, it's a pile of crap but...I always remember him from it.

[@kennny1508]

Remembering your uncle through a bad video game is diabolical lmao

[@Vekstar]

Glad to see your still around

[@nathanking6242]

@@kennny1508 It’s the thought that counts.

[@cubeflinger]

Everyone has an uncle n0bhead.

[@acehunter3229]

@@kennny1508 diabolical 🤣

[@RussDnB]

I was there. Bought it for my A1200 (maybe from Electronics Boutique). Got it home and couldn’t believe what I was “playing”. Took it back to the store that same afternoon and they happily gave me a refund.

[@anthonyharding4380]

I had the Amiga 1200 version. I have fond memories of changing the floppy disk mid-game every time I wanted to pull off a different special move. The box was sooo heavy with all the disks. My friends took the piss out of me for over 10 years for buying it xD

[@bigredracingteam9642]

So people had to change disks in the middle of a fight? That sounds horrible!

[@AmigaA-or2hj]

I still have the Amiga CD32 version. Is the 1200 version hard drive installable?

[@lewisclark1122]

To be fair, the developers were under immense pressure to get the game out by Xmas 94. I reckon that the developers probably spent so much time on the graphics that they ran out of time to develop the gameplay mechanics properly. Also, scheduling conflicts meant that Brian May wasnt able to record original music for the game, as was intended. Instead, he was only able to give them a couple of tracks from his most recent album.

[@Polkametal666]

I remember drooling over this games early coverage in the magazines, and when it came out I BEGGED my parents to buy this for our Amiga 1000. Thankfully my parents were wise enough to say no.

[@WWammyy]

The game feels like it came from the school of Amiga fighting games. The typical 1 action button combined with directions / dpad to execute the moves.

[@dhoffnun]

The robot designs in Rise 2 were so cool it kept me "playing" just to see all the hidden characters.

[@AlexanTheMan]

A prime example of how graphics aren't everything, they must not be given near total priority in game development. Despite this, some developers and publishers keep making that mistake 30 years later.

[@negirno]

A reviewer of one of our local gaming magazine wrote that "this should be advertised as CD full of animations, plus a lame-ass game as a bonus".

[@JohnDoe11VII]

Basically spot on. Looked amazing on MS-DOS, played okay, had barely any content locking player 1 slot to they cyborg. I'm sure the game was too hard to beat the 3rd fight for most people.

[@kohlmannj]

“The gameplay is…as good as the other versions” - re: the Game Gear port. Simply damning 🤣

[@Woodzta]

The only game I forced my siblings to play as Player 1 in VS mode so I could select a character...

[@Deathtank75]

🤣🤣🤣

[@hazardeur]

lol yeah. i always chose crushed and spammed the long leg attack. but the siblings were ok with it for a surprising long time just because they could actually play.

[@StoneTheCr0w]

This game on SNES gave me nightmares and anxiety attacks. The blue main guy and the front loader robot specifically.

[@cthulhupthagn5771]

Seriously?!

[@ronny332]

Now I have to dig for "One Must Fall: 2097" in my basement. Was such a fun game. Great video! Btw: even in the 90s I never gave a **censored** on the hyped visuals. Everything was sprite/bitmap based. And that wasn't an issue for me, as long as it ran fast and looked good at the same time.

[@noop9k]

Pray for Death was a game with pre-rendered graphics that actually impressed me, despite being a KI clone basically. OMF 2097 was still awesome, of course.

[@DeAthWaGer]

If you download OpenOMF, you don't have to dig 🙂

[@PorucznikBorewicz]

OMF was legit.

[@mangohead2493]

One must fall 😱 I used to love that game!!!

[@ronny332]

@@mangohead2493 I remembered the music at first. It was very pushing and fitted the game 100%. Great memories.

[@juliangrant9718]

This was one of those games I thought I played in a dream. But then when videos like this pop up I'm reminded that my dad did in fact rent this from our local video store for the weekend.

[@sleepingkirby]

I remember seeing all those ads and people saying its going to be great. And me as a kid going, "But it doesn't look all that impressive." Glad to know I wasn't wrong.

[@Cidriel]

for most of the runtime I was thinking "wow what did this game do to mvg" but then you showed off your copies and I understood immediately.

[@MikeDest]

As a young teen I bought into the hype, but luckily I only invested into a one time rental of the game during a sleepover with friends. We switched to Street Fighter 2 Turbo instead.

[@dsdgdsfegfeg]

Me & my friends were obsessed with hiring ST2 Turbo (so many nights). .memories brings back all the fuzzies

[@DeAthWaGer]

The number of bad fighting games I rented was staggering, but so glad I saved my money by not blindly buying them instead. I think I played Rise for about half an hour total before shutting it off and putting it back in the rental case. I remember going to school the next week and letting everyone know how bad it was, as we all were fascinated by the pictures in GameFan and the like. A few of my friends couldn't be convinced and had to rent it themselves 😂

[@nicksrandomreviews]

​@@DeAthWaGerThe fighting game as a genre is so wild. Like, a lot of fighting games back in the day were just...not good. Everything from Capcom and some of SNK's output was great, as was KI...but having played MK3 recently, wow does that just feel off. Or half the majesco shit that is on the Switch's NSO app.

[@Schrooms1992]

As a youth I used to weep in butcher shops

[@hadamana]

I remember fawning over magazine articles about this game for months. It looked so great in the screenshots. Thankfully we were the kind of family that rented games before we bought them, and this was one of those times that it saved us.

[@VaterOrlaag]

"Games media had broken the trust of their customers and it would take years to repair the damage" Still waiting for that to happen...

[@zaxlor]

My mate Richard "Dickie" Street had this for his PC when I was a teenager. He also has Mortal Kombat on the Mega Drive, but my Mum wouldn't let me play that 'cos it was "too violent". I remember him telling me he'd go Rise of the Robots and I was really excited to play it. I think we spent longer watching it load than we did playing it, only to go back to Mortal Kombat and telling my Mum "Nah, we didn't play anything violent" ♥

[@freddiejohnson6137]

What got me more was that the devs were able to trick all of the gaming media at the time and get them to help them hype the game up until release. In a way they put more effort into convincing people the game was going to be revolutionary and great than it actually being those things. People can say the hardware wasn't capable of those kinds of things but Rare pretty much proved it wasn't a hardware constraint and it was more that the devs were in way over their heads and got too caught up in the marketing side of it.

[@hazardeur]

to be fair it had pretty high reqs for the time. i was barely able to pull it off on my 486 dx2 including the whole package of optimizations like memmaker, configring config.sys and autoexec.bat and load of other stuff i can't remember. also i had to delete like half my harddrive for it lol

[@nn99nn99]

Back then, there were so many fighting games that gamers were naturally skeptical of anything that was not developed by Capcom. Rise of the Robots was no exception: people expected it to be janky.

[@CMm-n1j]

I think that's revisionism tbh. That certainly wasn't the typical gamer. This game fooled a lot of people, including myself at the time.

[@nn99nn99]

@@CMm-n1j Not revisionism. Anything not made by Capcom was sus by default because the gameplay sucked from all competitors. World Heroes, KOF, KI, MK, all weak or janky or just not as tight as SF2. Also the animations/poses for Rise looked terrible straight away.

[@CMm-n1j]

@@nn99nn99 Yeah but that's not most gamers, otherwise this whole predicament of the game being over-hyped and people in their droves only to be disappointed would never have happened in the first place.

[@nn99nn99]

@@CMm-n1j Anyone can say anything was overhyped, even if it wasn't. Revisionism indeed. I lived in that era and there was always skepticism on random jank like Rise by default.

[@CMm-n1j]

@@nn99nn99 I mean go off but you are arguing against a legacy of a game that is universally known for being overhyped. Sorry if that is contrary to your experience.

[@dodgykebaab]

I remember at the time feeling like I was the only person who was skeptical about rise. Outside of about 4 Japanese studios, most fighting games were crap in the 90s. If it didn’t SNK, Namco, Capcom or Sega on it; it was probably garbage.

[@pablocasas5906]

There's a part in the video showing a magazine article talking about how people were starting to get bored by Street Fighter II and it also said, "the less we say about the [SFII] clones, the better", I mean, there were plenty of bad "SFII clones", but there were also some great fighting games like Fatal Fury 2/Special

[@XinKotetsu]

Real talk white people can't make fighting games.

[@WheatMillington]

One Must Fall was good

[@JazGalaxy]

Rise of The Robots had SUCH a massive advertising campaign that once you played it, you felt like YOU were the person who was doing something wrong rather than the game being terrible. It was like, "Did I not install this properly or something? Is this the wrong game?" I've never seen anything like it. 30 years later and I still feel like I must not have seen the REAL version somehow.

[@ajlomax603]

🤣😂🤣😂😂😂😂 facts

[@JohnSmith-xq1pz]

Cyborg should've stuck to PinBall...

[@jonathanlisowski5618]

The farse for this was so incredible! I was so in disbelief, that with each later release I had hope that it was just the 16-bit ports that were a joke! Nope! Not the case. The hype for this was so strong, I was convinced to lie to myself over & over again.

[@MattZildjian]

My dad got me this on PC when I was a kid, it was on something like 15 floppy disks, however disk 2 was corrupted so it wouldn't ever install. I was saved.

[@CMm-n1j]

It cost a mint to buy at RRP though at the time

[@georgefrankly]

I can't help but feel like they could have accomplished identical graphics for a lower cost using stop motion maquettes, seeing as the final output resolution and pallet would be so low. It really feels like the CGI approach was chosen for marketability and not the desired vision.

[@Cyphax55]

I remember playing it on our PC (a 486) back in the day, but it had no music in-game at all, which was a very funny disconnect with the whole "Brian Eno did the music" spiel they advertised with. I spent quite some time thinking the PC somehow failed me, but it wasn't the PC that failed. I also remember the setup program being the first hurdle: you can re-assign the keys, but it wouldn't recognize the arrow keys, so you had to go with either the default controls, or change it to something that didn't include the arrow keys. It's as though the devs never saw a PC before because on top of that, we end up with ONE attack button, as though they had never seen a normal keyboard. It's so bad, the SNES version is a half decent game in comparison.

[@shadowflash705]

The other Brian - Brian May. And also yeah, it's not like he did music for the game as in full OST, but a single track which is just a few riffs.

[@Cyphax55]

@@shadowflash705 Oooh Brian May of course, thanks! It was pretty eyebrow raising when the (PC) game started with those guitar riffs (and a broken title screen) and then just went silent. And teenage me sitting there wondering "did I do something wrong?"

[@SavageToe]

Thank you for doing a story on this game :) I bought this for my CD32 from Myer in Geelong. Being 12 months out of school I had little money and there were very few CD32 games. I think I played this for about 10 mins before the subsequent gut punch pushed me back towards that Diggers game......ack

[@SotNist]

I don't even remember any marketing, but I rented it for the SNES and it made me mad that I wasted my rental on it. I always called it the worst game I ever played for years.

[@garystinten9339]

There is worse than this. It was a futuristic tank game that looked like it stepped back into the realm of basic programming . Your ta k could move forward and backwards, side to side and jump. It could shoot and fire missiles (from memory) and the best bit.. it was in a black environment.

[@SotNist]

@@garystinten9339 ngl I love retro tank games, but I believe you lol

[@seebarry4068]

Yep, this was at least as bad as ET in disappointment.

[@garystinten9339]

@@SotNist I honestly can't remember the name.. but I think it was so ilar/same to battle tanx or something like that.. cyber army?? Ehhhh not sure

[@BurritoKingdom]

The hype wasn't that big in the US, especially if the magazine didn't have a European correspondent. Like nobody in the US cared about the Bitmap Brothers. The general consensus back in the 90s were all the best games were made in Japan.

[@dunnono00]

The gaming mags of the day had so many advertisements for this game. The shiny graphics looked sort of nice, but little else about it really grabbed my attention. There was no real hype amongst the average consumer as far as I could tell, and Killer Instinct would have the market cornered with the 3d rendered style of graphics. It was only years later that I learned Rise was a complete bomb of a game, though it evidently sold decently. I can't help but be charmed by the whole backstory, though. Maybe I would have been infuriated if I had brought it back in the day, but looking back, it gives me nostalgia for those fast, vibrant times in the video game industry.

[@lzmiranda]

I remember renting this game from the video store when I was about 4 or 5 years old. The cover art got me really hyped up. Even though I was too young to fully judge or understand it, I definitely recall feeling somewhat underwhelmed. Like, "is this really all there is to it"?

[@garystinten9339]

I remember it when I was younger too.. And you were right as a 5/6 year old at the time to get hyped.. it was frikken robots FIGHTING!!!

[@JamesChatting]

Gaming magazines don't "fall for the hype", they just get paid for glowing advance previews

[@JDoe-gf5oz]

Yup. Some big organization fired that a reviewer when he gave a bad rating to Kane & Lynch 2 and made the publisher mad.

[@Anamonator]

0:45 People that watched the ads: this game looks amazing! The Actual Game:

[@ketchupkatsup9805]

That was a terrific edit 😂😂

[@talison461]

Ubisoft trailers be like:

[@MarquisDeSang]

it made us dream and I thank them for that.

[@MartianInAHumansBody]

I only remember Rise of the Robots because of its full page ads in the gaming magazines. Never played it, and happy to hear I didnt miss anything

[@nols8244]

The hype surrounding Project Reality-Ultra 64 were insane. Those images of "games" "running" on Project-Reality-Ultra 64 were like 2 generations ahead of what Nintendo 64 were capable of in the end. The first look of Hybrid Heaven on Ultra 64 were ridiculous, the graphics were at high-tier Gamecube/Xbox level. No doubt the most hyped up console ever, which I has witnessed. This game is top-5 the most hyped up game no doubt. The buzz were unreal.

[@sc3ku]

GREAT forgotten example. I remember the Nintendo Power feature claiming we’d be in Heaven…Hybrid Heaven. Took ages to come out and promptly went. What a letdown. I remember an earlier E3 preview listing it along other games like Earthbound 64, Mario RPG 2, Conker’s Twelve Tails or whatever…the N64 lineup did not turn out like I expected in the early days

[@ObeseChess]

Man, I’d wiped Hybrid Heaven from my memory entirely.

[@jamesodonoghue75]

Wow. I worked on this as a tester at Mirage back in the day! It was crap then and old father time has not been kind to it. One of the managing directors went on local telly and said the graphics were ..."the equivalent of curing cancer..."! Good fucking god! The hubris of it! Thanks for the video, belly laughs are go! O the memories....

[@RoamingAdhocrat]

22:40 "throw caution into the wind" means the opposite, it means to discard caution and be reckless!

[@LittleRainGames]

Man you just know some kid invited someone over to brag how he has the game with the "best graphics in the world," and when the friend was ultimately unimpressed and called it boring, they got really defensive about it and started showing all these magazine articles to their friend to prove them wrong.

[@rsmith02]

People still play games to show off

[@RobsonRoverRepair]

Lies where an understatement. It might as well have been a politician's manifesto!

[@endoflevelboss]

lol what a nerd 🤓

[@talison461]

Most honest ubisoft trailer💀:

[@2ndeaster]

Were

[@RN1441]

Super advanced AI! Uncompromising Graphics! Full 360 degree motion! Stunning disappointment! I wonder how Star Citizen is doing...

[@PH96Official]

Bro it's a videogame it ain't that serious.

[@Galgomite]

Such a great video. I hope you do more retrospective journalism like this.

[@johnsimon8457]

If I was making a fighter, I'd have prototyped it using stick figures in MS paint. There's WAAAY more in the mechanics of a fighter vs a platformer. I don't know if they realized that until right at the end "Ok we're out of time, ship it." Arcade fighters have to stand on their own merits, which is why they're prototyped to the teeth and still have multiple version releases / upgrade patches. It's very strange that there's no comparison to Killer Instinct as an example of a Pretty Good fighter with rendered graphics. I'm looking at wikipedia and Rise was released AFTER Killer Instinct. I guess marketing for the arcade wasnt as evenly distributed or ... SOMETHING.

[@JeremyLevi]

I feel like marketing for arcade games was mostly just targeted at arcade owners. Customers just walked into the arcade and if there was a big crowd around a new game that was all the advertisement it needed. lol

[@PeterMackay]

I say this as a Brit, but back in the 90s we were typically completely outclassed when it came to game design. Comparing ROTR as a competitor to SF2 was ignorance in the extreme, when all the staff the developer would put on the project were juniors.

[@CMm-n1j]

We always were, but what made UK developers special was their experience pushing out high quality games on inferior hardware. Notice that is the opposite of the RoR situation: which was only one experienced guy taking on a small team of novices to try and make a high tech visual blockbuster. No wonder it flopped.

[@InflatableConan]

The animated intro used up an entire disc.. 😂 That's so awesomely retro.

[@MarquisDeSang]

3DS (3D Studio DOS) never had Raytracing. Raytracing only came in the form of a plugin Ray-Gun for 3DS max years later. Real 3D was a pure raytracer but was not used for that game.

[@SimonBauer7]

and that raytracing isnt like the raytracing we have now...

[@MarquisDeSang]

@@SimonBauer7 Actually raytracing was better back then because it was not optimized with loss of data. A software like Real 3D (Amiga) was way more precise than the stuff running in GPU today.

[@kathleendelcourt8136]

@@SimonBauer7 Real time raytracing in video games is a cut down version of the real thing, they're cutting every possible corners to get it to work at a playable framerate.

[@Tigrou7777]

What was the name of the technique used by 3DS back then to render the scenes then ?

[@MarquisDeSang]

@@Tigrou7777 Scanline Rendering, the same technique used by videogames. And this is not the Dicing/Scanline Rendering (at least for the first ray) used in Renderman renderers.

[@todesziege]

It's curious that not a word is spent on the multiplayer, which is the bread and butter of any fighting game.

[@jeppgogi3170]

feels like not a word was spent from the development team if there should be multiplayer. It was just a blank stare as an answer to a question they forgot to ask themselves from what I remember a second controller can control the enemy fighter you select in practice, but player 1 is always blue guy

[@todesziege]

@@jeppgogi3170 That sounds like something worth mentioning.

[@mattparker9726]

10:33 As a kid, I was BLOWN AWAY by Myst. It looks so dated now. 😂😂

[@joshfacio9379]

I remember myst being a system seller and people actually bought macs and later pcs just to play that game. I think that and 7th guest helped show what cd tech could bring to gaming. Of course then studios got carried away and made fmv games thinking everyone wanted to watch pixely videos instead of playing games.

[@SparkyMK3]

Speaking as someone who didn't play MYST until a few years ago, I love the early pre-rendered look and atmosphere of it. Its a very pretty game, even if it's not 'cutting edge' any more. Though it helps that it also has actual substance to the point and click gameplay. I still love revisiting it just to soak in the mood and enjoy the worldbuilding, or figure out the puzzles that I forgot the solutions too. :)

[@seanwieland9763]

@@joshfacio9379the reason my family Gateway 2000 desktop got a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 sound card and 2x Plextor CD-ROM drive was because of The 7th Guest.

[@mattparker9726]

@@joshfacio9379 LOL At least I haf JOB!

[@rsmith02]

Its sequel was just rereleaed for modern systems.

[@jj454]

I remember buying Rise of the Robots back in the day completely unaware. Easily my first “WTF is this” game

[@PimpinBassie2]

I clearly remember this game and the Daikatana amount of hype surrounding it...

[@Sgt_Glory]

"Tighten up the graphics on level three"... I _almost_ missed that reference 😂

[@danielmaggs1048]

Where’s it from? lol

[@Sgt_Glory]

​@@danielmaggs1048 It's from an old TV commercial for a local college (Westwood College, no affiliation to the game studio) offering a "video game testing" course. The commercial was massively cringe at the time of release and obviously made by people who didn't understand game design.. or games. It achieved meme status on the internet, and you can find it on here by just looking up the phrase.

[@IIARROWS]

Worst part: gaming journalism didn't really improved from then, right now it's much worse.

[@totalvoid6234]

I think you forget how bad it was back then. Actual overt corruption like was rampant back then is rare nowadays and general incompetence was even more rife.

[@IIARROWS]

@@totalvoid6234 Just like today, but with extra ignorance on gaming. In the '90s at least writers have a passion and knowledge, especially on the technical aspects. Today almost none know anything about graphics, or technical features like netcode which should be the basis for certain games.

[@Mamiya645]

The journos would have defended RoTR so hard in the face of the gamers.. Someone lost their job for giving a terribad game a low rating, European Amiga magazine, early 90's I recall. Publisher pressure and legal threats pushed the print house too far. Then came late 00's Jeff Gerstmann's "leaving" of GameSpot for iirc being considered bad for their advertisement business.

[@WeeWeeJumbo]

@@Mamiya645Jeff Gerstmann was fired by GameSpot after he gave a 74 or something to the original Kane & Lynch. this was equal to the critical consensus online, but GameSpot had accepted enormous ad buys from EA, so the bosses above the bosses decided to fire him. GameSpot was never the same after that. they’ve still never actually recovered

[@rsmith02]

It's a totally different world back then. Today we're awash with information. Back then the magazines were the gatekeepers but in turn just had the information that companies told them. Half of the source material was in Japanese and inaccessible. There weren't hardcore reviewers doing framerate tests, etc. Today suffers from amateurization of the field as without the gatekeepers we have reviewers of various quality and ethical levels and it's up to us to figure out which ones are trustworthy.

[@hectickmind]

Thanks!

[@SoilentGr33n]

Nostalgia Nerd also used "They Lied to Us" tagline for this game LOL. I guess they did lie to us.

[@M1XART]

PC -version of Rise Of The Robots looked actually really good for -94. The gameplay was terrible and there was only one playable character. Killer Instinct wiped the floor with it later on same year.

[@youuuuuuuuuuutube]

AI is not as hard to develop as we think. If it's done using tables that must be created manually then it takes forever and it's not even good. But by using simple Q-learning, you just let the AI play against itself for a while and you store the results (states + possible good inputs) and it will play pretty well, and even surprise you! That's a very old technique btw.

[@arostwocents]

The Bad Influence preview showed a lot of footage and it blows my mind that people didnt notice the game looked truly awful, despite what was being said. Luckily the hype for this passed me by as a kid. The biggest blow for me was how hyped I was for Mario RPG but it didnt come out in PAL regions 😭

[@coreymitcho]

Bed times just been postponed by 34minutes 😅

[@SRC267]

Why would you sleep at 12:50am?

[@Brahvim]

@@SRC267 Is this in @coreymitcho's timezone too?

[@SRC267]

@@Brahvim no response so they've gone to bed. Timezone might be different

[@jeffreymatias5879]

I still remember first playing this with my brother and we couldnt figure out how to change the 1st player character in versus mode. Such a fundamental concept in a fighting game that was not there.

[@dinckelman]

3:09 this is exactly why I've never trusted gaming publications, and their opinions. Their goal used to be to sell magazines, and in turn generate the hype. Now it's all the same, but with video content. I will practically never buy a new game, unless it's strongly recommended by my peers

[@JediMB]

In Sweden, we had about a decade and a half of excellent games journalism and criticism in the form of a magazine called Super Play, starting in the mid-90s. They were well-liked by readers because of their entertaining personalities and quality writing, and also by developers for having interesting thoughts and questions during interviews.

[@garystinten9339]

Also, you can get a sense of tone from the reviewer too.. you know when they're "hyped" and when the hype is real.

[@Renoistic]

If I just played whatever my friends are playing I would miss out on loads of cool games. Especially as I get older. Most of my friends only play gachas and online shooters nowadays.

[@JediMB]

@@Renoistic Yeah, I always tend to see my friends just playing the latest AAA thing on release day, even when they should know better because the studio's previous entry was a disaster.

[@CMm-n1j]

There _were_ good PC gaming magazines, though. It's just that if you weren't on the hype train, publishers would treat your magazine as a second-class rag and corral gamers to look elsewhere at their shiny objects of nonsense. Magazines that held their integrity and scepticism slowly went out of business. Mainstream publishers always wanted games media as their propaganda arm, and nothing more.

[@HoFF9000]

Great little trip down memory lane. :) Keep it up, love these retrospectives!