To be fair, in some sense this *was* the future of gaming: endlessly delayed, over-hyped, broken on release, and full of unfulfilled promises. All it's really missing is microtransactions.
The title change in Bad Influence was them literally offering every gaming journalist free artwork in the style of ROTR for free publicity. They even made a robot version of Dave Perry for publicity. (there should be an image of it on the web, it's on the archive of his website for sure)
Ah, the classic lesson that top of the line graphics should never take priority over the actual gameplay. You hear that, Sony and Microsoft?! You can polish a turd all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a *turd!*
Fantastic work! Great detail and research. I got wrapped up in the hype, as soon as it came out i popped down to my local rental picked it up for the MD and i was gutted with the first few minutes of playing it. One of the biggest turkeys i had the displeasure of playing.
Tell me about it, Harper. I recall something similar happened with the TV show Stargate Universe. The original 1994 Stargate movie by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich was a huge hit, and Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis were both successful TV shows that built on the mythology of the movie. Naturally, SG-U was hyped to hell and back as SyFy reinventing the wheel, and critics giving it tons of praise when it premiered. However, though, when people tuned in to watch it... Uh... What's the kinder term for a DISASTER? People hated it, including SG Fans, and the franchise was killed. Sound Familiar?
"It's not a conventional beat 'em up. We're using a lot of artificial intelligence... We'll definitely have one over Street Fighter II" ............BAHAHAHAHAHA! That is the most hilarious and embarrassing quote I think I've ever read in a gaming magazine! Brilliant!
It's amazing because in the 90s if the game did have artificial intelligence you would have needed a supercomputer cluster just to run the ai. In fact that's the sole reason why ai didn't become mainstream until this decade.
Really? I think one lauding Rise of the Robots as "The first game to employ the services of an interior designer" probably beats it. You had a good run Street Fighter 2 but it's time to face the facts and look at those interiors!
Juganawt I cringed when I read that quote. I honestly wonder if it was all his genuine delusion or if he had a few scotches before sitting down for the interview.
I saved up birthday money and pocket money to buy this as a kid on PC. I can still remember the dawning sense of disappointment when I started playing it. I think I stopped playing after literally three fights. Gutted. It’s still one of my first memories of feeling truly ripped off.
Never would have guessed that this obscure little bad game occasionally reviewed on YT had THIS MUCH of a legacy back in its time. Thanks for the insight!
I recall the lead developer (Sean Griffiths?) on Gamesmaster, bullshitting about the gameplay, "it DOES play as well as as it looks", etc. Unless the developers were all in denial, there's no way they could have thought the game was good. They had the mindset of 'we spent months rendering this shit, we need to get something back for all that time, effort and expense' and allowed it to be released. Apparently they came clean later and admitted the game was dreadful.
+TheIsolatedGamerz Yeah, I remember it being in Gamesmaster a lot. It's a shame actually that there's surprisingly few issues of Gamesmaster available on the Internet these days, otherwise I'm sure I could have found a hell of a lot more silly quotes (and possibly another atrocious review, although I can't remember/find what they gave it. It doesn't seem to have been reviewed on the Gamesmaster show itself, surprisingly...the Bad Influence kids reviewed it, scorched it and gave it 2/5 - I would have been quite curious to see what the Gamesmaster journalists gave it).
I have a few issues some where lying about. If i find the article ill take a picture of it and send it to you. Gamesmaster was good show, Great to see another Brit doing a game review show. Keep up the work :)
8:50 "It's the first beat-'em-up to use full ray-traced graphics throughout" - ...would've been, except they were beaten to the punch (by a couple of months) by One Must Fall: 2097 on the PC, which was actually a decent game IIRC (even seems to have a small cult following still). Also, why is that big robot at 21:18 doing the British "wanker" hand gesture at us?
Redhotsmasher I was thinking to myself "I seem to remember it wasn't bad, why are they saying it's terrible", then remembered it was OMF I played, not RoR. 👍
One Must Fall 2097 was the game I owned. I don't remember hearing about RotR, but why would I pay attention if I did hear the name? One Must Fall was everything Rise wished it was.
I have come to realise that your reviews are the best on youtube BY FAR. the research you are putting in to them, the editing and the brilliant commentary. looking forward to another year of great reviews, cheers Kim!
"Waste of time"? Is that it? I beleive it was Sega Power who called it a "curly great turd of hype, oozed from the putrid anus of the gaming industry", concluding with "Put THAT on yer box and sell it". Hilariously, in 1999 my Amiga fanatic friend tried to impress me by telling he'd got "Rise of the Robots and everything" on it.
That's true, his impediment and his alternative orientation is his trademark but not in a horrible freakshow kind of way, it's just Kim Justice and everybody accepts that...which is good.
I remember when I bought this game for PC when it came out. There were posters and promo material all over the store, and a massive row of shelves filled with only this game. For a split second, the fact that all the shelves were *full* struck me, but I assumed it was because they were just keeping them stocked up. I noticed a couple of employees smirking at me, but I just assumed they were just bored idiots with nothing better to do. When I got home and played the game, it all made sense. This was the experience that taught me to see through the hype. Lesson learned.
Honestly this seems more like Mighty No. 9- you have a promising idea for a game, at some point the publisher/developer decides to make it available for every platform under the sun, the resources you would normally spend on building a good game go entirely into porting it across several different systems, and the result is something threadbare and boring.
Evan Waters In a way I can see this. Though in RotR's case, the developers were overpowered by the publisher. Looking back at it, that's one thing I can give to Mirage. Unlike MN9 or NMS, Rise was likely the victim of an overbearing publisher fucking up their original idea. Seriously, why the fuck did we need a Game Gear version?
No Man's Sky is "okay" (NOT good, but I wouldn't call it bad) and not as hyped compared to Rise of the Robots. Rise of the Robots is a HORRIBLE game. I give it a 1 out of 10. Also, it was hyped to all hell. ONE EXAMPLE: in EVERY comic book back then, there was a Rise of the Robots ad, from Marvel's Spider-man to DC's Batman to Image's Spawn, etc. etc. The ad campaign for Rise of the Robots was HUGE. Thats the reason it sold a lot despite being a horrible game
I've always been somewhat fascinated by this game. I wish more of the developers would actually talk about it because something must have gone seriously awry during development. Was it a case that they simply bit off more than they could chew, and didn't actually have the knowledge/experience needed to make a decent fighting game (see the Sega game X-Perts for an example of something like this)? Was development derailed by the need to constantly feed the intense media attention? Was it just intended as a cheap, low profile game that ended up being massively overhyped by the publisher and developed for too many platforms? I think a post-mortem of the game's development could be quite interesting if the developers would only go on record.
Great look at this game. I remember buying this game as a kid with all the money I had painstakingly saved. All the hype and cool pictures were enough for me to trust that it is a good buy on release. Oh boy was I wrong and downright devastated. I still consider it one of the worst purchases I have ever made in my life.
Good video Kim. I was a freelancer for Future publishing between 1995 and 1997. I heard many a story about the hilarity that was ROTR. I also knew all about rival magazines propensity for 'winning' exclusives in return for a guaranteed 90%+ score. Magazines like C&VG were losing market share to Future magazines and it seemed ethics went out the window when it came to giving an honest appraisal of a game to a readership who had a limited income for buying them. As far as I know, Future magazines didn't fall into that trap but there were some pretty blatant attempts to buy review scores, that I witnessed from games PR firms in my time as a freelancer.
I remember the hype surrounding this game, it was insane. It was towards the end of my Amiga's life...I was thirteen years old and forked out over £30 for the 1200 version. I couldn't believe how sh*t it was. It wasn't the never ending disk swapping - I was used to that, being a huge Monkey Island fan, it was the shocking, shocking gameplay. I tried to like it, I really did, but I was back playing Mortal Kombat 2 within hours. I remember being an avid 'Amiga Power' reader, but on the month of its release, I (mistakenly) bought 'Amiga Action' with its absurdly high score, leading to two months' pocket money spunked. Other colossal wastes of money: Gazza's Super Soccer on the Spectrum, a Barcode Battler (still don't understand what it was supposed to do). Merry Christmas KJ, keep up the good work.
I really don't know how people con say Delphine Software's Shaq-Tu is the worst 16-Bit fighting game when something like Rise of the Robots exists. That game was at least passable, it just had somewhat delayed controls (that you can get used to!) Here are a few quotes (translated) from german magazines for your amusement: "The only time I laughed while testing the game was when I read this quote from the Game Gear-manual: 'Due to intelligent programming the enemies learn the player's attack strategies and adapt to it' [...] Only Dirk was able to have some fun with the game: 'I beat him' he told me after blindly hammering the two buttons on his game gear for 30 seconds." (Video Games magazin, they gave it 23% on the GG, 38% on the MD) "What have I done that I have to test this game?! [...] In 1P mode it depends on luck if you win or lose" (Mega Fun Magazin, he gave it 38% on the SNES and 33 on the MD) "The are lots of Special moves: One for every fighter, to be exact, and it almost never even works!" (Video games magazin in a seperate test for the SNES version, which received 40%)
How come some people consider Kim's way of speaking a speech impediment? I guess it's an accent from a region in England. I understood him perfectly, and I'm Argentinean (hence, a non-native speaker of English).
Ok, this is a legitimate look at a terrible, terrible game. I remember the hype and the fallout, but I had no idea about the UK magazines praising it. Wow. So much shady games "journalism" back then. Your videos are fantastic, Kim.
One Must Fall 2097 was released the same year and it was great robot fighting game. It's really dissapointing that people doesn't talk about at all. It seems it vanished in retro games history
Instantly recognised Stuart Campbell's writing style at the end there. I remember all of this so well. I wonder how many people were turned off games entirely by this.
I'm not sure if anyones already asked but at around 7:00 in the video there seems to be a montage of death scenes or similar of the each robot killing each other instead of just cyborg. Where are those from? I've seen a version of the game that had failures for Cyborg but not those. Any help? just curious to see them if they exist.
So hyped. We were so terribly lied to with this game. We had all the mag coverage and even appearances on GamesMaster/Bad Influence were we pitched super hard saying it was "plays as good as it looks". A real low point for gaming journalism and trust was not recovered for a while for us who relied on them.
I played the arcade version at the Trocadero Leicester Square... Only it wasn't an arcade machine. It was a PC version in an arcade cabinet, as I learned when the game blue-screened.
such a great vid! I was sold hard on the hype back in the day and was extremely let down when I was finally able to rent the game. I kept hoping there was a port somewhere that did the game justice. I love the end where you discuss the details on the disparity among the reviews - something that needs more honest investigation even now on gaming sites
Wow.....I forgot how utterly gash this game was - in the same way you subconsciously suppress bad memories, I couldn't even remember whether I'd played it. Within a second of seeing the "game" footage it all came flooding back. The "horse wank" quote sums it up perfectly. Great video again.
A terrific look at an abysmal game! I remember buying Rise 2, having not played Rise 1 but remembering the marketing campaign, and thinking the best part of the game was the Brian May song... that didn't appear in game but was on the CD. Great work! Keep it up!
Wasn't a huge fan of the game (I had the PC version) but! I remember there being a huge cardboard RofR robot in WH Smiths and I asked someone in there when they had finished it if I could have it (I was like 16? ish) - one day I walked past the shop and the guy came out and said could take it.. the thing was like 6ft tall and it was awesome having it in my bedroom. So I got that going for me.
Fantastic vid. If only there were more Amiga Powers and Jonathan Davies around these days to call out the likes of Bethesda, gaming might be in much better shape.
Great mini-documentary, Kim. Even my child self knew to rent this game and take it back immediately. Do you happen to have any info on what happened to Jonathan Davies (the Amiga reviewer who slated the game)? Was wondering if he was still out there working but I can't find anything!
I have spanish magazines giving 95/100 score to this shit. The first time I played on my PC I thought it was bugged, but no...the game was just a turd.
The first and last game I ever preordered. Lesson learned. I seem to remember my dad had a colleague who was cool enough to be into games around for dinner that day, so it's a bit of an embarrassing memory.
Very well done. I remember this all too well, and I remember playing a 'demo' version that came on one of the Amiga magazine coverdisks, and thinking at the time what an utter pile of shite it was, and that there was no way I'd be buying the full version for any amount of money. And for that, I'm thankful. I remember reading reviews that sung it's praises, and coming to the conclusion that the publisher had paid for an advertisement to look like a review, particularly when other reviews were, umm, not as full of praise... Many years later (in fact, only recently) I tried out the CD32 version. And I'm so glad I didn't waste my cash back in the day when I owned a CD32, or got the A1200 version for my A1200, or even got it to use as a door stop... Thank you for a job well done, as usual. This game was, as I've seen you write, "as basic as a sinclair spectrum", and I hope you don't mind me quoting you there, but it just seems so perfect for that game, when compared to so many other absolute classics from the era.
My brother and I had this on PC back in the mid-90's. I remember it came on like 10 floppy disks. Believe me, the loading was not worth the wait. One of the worst game I've ever played. The only saving grace is I think we got the game on sale.
About CVG never being the same again after this: The revamp they had very soon after this (with Paul Davies from Mean Machines as editor) was goddamn glorious. It became the best games magazine available until it changed format again in the very late 90's when arcades died and EMAP tried to really water the product down.
I live in the US and I'm glad to see that we weren't the only ones to have their gaming magazines giving this piece of crap nearly perfect scores. However, I remember some magazines like GamePro giving RotR glowing praise BEFORE IT WAS ACTUALLY RELEASED! Perhaps instead of bribing publishers and reviewers, they should have put that extra money into making something good.
It would have been interesting how this game might have turned out had Time Warner not gotten their talons into it. It might have been rather decent, but i don't think it would have been the SFII beater they were claiming to be before Warner helped screw everything up.
Here from Matt McMuscles, and this history/review is amazing. I didn't realize that it was hyped so much in the UK. Also, that Brian May song that was supposed to be part of it is a banger.
3D rendered graphics and fmv on a system that can only do 32/64 colors on screen. What can go wrong? Color banding is even worse when a gradient that's supposed to be one color has to be green and blue in some brightnesses because there aren't enough colors.
I feel lucky to have been too poor to have afforded full-price Amiga games in 1994. Often, the cover disks had been stolen from the magazines I would save up to buy, so I never got to play a demo either. A few years later, I tried the SNES version in our local video shop's Game Zone, where various consoles and many games could be played for only £1 per hour, far less seedy than the arcades on the seafront. I was stunned by the limited, frozen movement of the uncharismatic lead, immediately seeing through the aesthetics into the basic attack/defence options, no doubt belching my Nemesis drink in disdain. It was soon switched for another cart, probably Zombies, by the video shop staff behind the wall where the SNES consoles were hidden. I was suspicious of graphically-led games for a while, eventually finding peace with Sam and Max Hit the Road.
"How about a novel written by Penguin?" I read that one, I think. Found it in the library at one point. Vaguely remember it as being weird and interesting.
Ah, remembering a "friend" bringing this game over for the SNES back in the days. He told me it's great. So we played a match. Then I laughed, showed him the door and never spoke to him again. Good times.
I bought this game as a kid for 60 bucks, probably the worst game purchase I ever made. Especially at a time when stores would not allow game returns or I would have returned it the day I purchased it.
I'm enjoying this video but please try to keep the text on screen at a minimum. I came to watch and listen to a video after all. If you're showing a quote on screen, maybe it would be better to have you narrate it instead. Instead i have to always pause the video and read. Also, pick a more easy to read font. One that's not all in CAPS and make the text size a bit smaller. Other than that. I like this video. (I get that this was made in 2015 and hopefully the author has made good changes since then.)
I remember waiting years for this shit game on the mega drive I got it home put it in 10 minutes later I was back down woolworths demanding my money back this piece of trash was meant to change the future of fighting games lol only thing it changed was my temper in woolworths.
We're 'lucky' that the arcade version is playable in MAME; neither of the two known arcade cabinets work. Interestingly there's also a version of Zool on the same/similar hardware but nobody has claimed to own a copy.
Hi there, I'm looking to document the remaining Rise arcade cabs if possible. I know one is the non working cab owned by Ordyne, but do you know who owns the second cab and is there a source of info on it please? Cheers
@@cathoderayguns I hadn't got any trouble in understanding him. When I was studying to become a translator of English, we used to have exercises where we were taught how to differentiate among the various accents of English-speaking countries (Scotland, Ireland, the USA, Australia, India, et cetera), and we also saw the different British accents, even though, for the two subjects dealing with the pronunciation of English, the so-called RP English was the standard (RP means "received pronunciation". This was the role model in the nineteenth century and nowadays it is spoken by around 2% of the total English population.) Greetings from Argentina.
Good video and I think you managed to capture the epic crapiness of this true stinker and blot on video game history. This game truly was memorable for all the wrong reasons. I unfortunately fell for the hype as so did many others. I remember vividly to this day how you couldn't escape the juggernaut of an advertising campaign. Then reality quickly hit after my older brother so kindly bought me the game for my Amiga 1200 at £30. Even though it wasn't my money, I actually felt bad for him after the initial excitement turned to horror. I followed Amiga Power and had that very issue that you referred to. They were harsh but fair in their reviews but they absolutely brutalized ROTR and rightfully so. It remains for me, one the funniest and brutal reviews of any entertainment medium. It became blatantly obvious very quickly that something was seriously amiss when Amiga Power awarded it 5% and other publications 90% plus?!?! Alas, the truth transpired too late and many unfortunate gamers were too traumatised to fork out their pocket money for several years to come.
Fantastic work as always Kimble, everything surrounding this game is so hilarious in retrospect. Such a cynical case of the marketing being the focus as opposed to the actual product.
I remember seeing this game being advertised at a local flea market at the time. They had a big cardboard cutout of the protagonist "Coton" and were showcasing the PC version. The graphics were impressive and still kinda are in this video. I never played the game, though, as my computer was too shit. Never heard a peep about this game shortly after that.
Could the game, if left to the original developers, have ever been any good? Was it destroyed by the money and the hype, or was its turkeyness inherent and unavoidable? Could some gameplay have been crowbarred into it, if gameplay rather than graphics/intro/Mr Angie/ports had been the focus? I've always been better at asking questions than answering them. Haven't I?
+Alex Stokoe Honestly, I'm leaning towards "no" on that one. Partly because the "original" versions of the game (Amiga/PC) are actually way worse than almost all of the ports for the MD, SNES and what have you (I'd only put the Game Gear version below them 'cause that's just a joke), but from the various articles that I read - a lot of the core things that make ROTR so lousy were there from the beginning, e.g. that supposed artificial intelligence and what-not. The money and hype didn't help, but I think it would have probably been a bit of a shite game anyway. It took a LOT to make a beat-'em-up any cop whatsoever on the Amiga/PC back then, considering how limited they were in that genre compared to consoles (better graphics, but most people were still using one-button joysticks).
+Kim Justice Yes, I like the logic of your reply. Shadow Fighter showed them how a beat-em-up COULD work with a one-buttoner, but only just. I never played Rise [I never bought an Amiga game until I[d] read [AP] and I cant recall that any pals did, either - everyone got SWOS for that Christmas. Ive got Rise on the Mega Drive now, and it is phenomenally bad. Further to this, I recall AP's 'Guide to the Future of Video Game Reviews', which was an on-the-nose satire of what was to happen. I always assumed it was based on the RoTR high marks debacle.
+Kim Justice This project reminds me of one I worked on for three years. (I won't say which.) It was a sports game, and all of our pre-production focus (and the focus of our conversations with publishers and, later, press) was on the distinctive look of the game and how it was going to be different from the competition, especially the market leaders. There was just one problem. Nobody at the company knew how to make a game of this type. We didn't have the experience, and we didn't buy it in. We were (as a company) incredibly arrogant: the game type seemed simple, and we assumed we could get up to speed on the basics in no time and then exceed the competition in both looks and playability. Big mistake. The game type in question may have looked simple, but it wasn't. There were a thousand problems that other developers had encountered and solved before that we had to solve for the first time. The biggest one was how to balance responsiveness with looks: the more physical realism you put into the players, the harder it was to make them sufficiently responsive for the game to feel fun rather than sluggish. (By contrast, a more cartoony, less realistic style would have given much greater latitude for responsiveness, because there would have been fewer verisimilitude constraints.) We didn't honestly know where the fun came from, because finding the fun in a game is often the result of thousands upon thousands of man-hours of experimentation and tuning, and it's often REALLY hard to divine this stuff by reverse-engineering it from other products. Much of it is hidden away from you. Indeed, one thing we gradually learned is that in sports games (and fighting games are sports games of a sort) you often don't even realize as a player what it is you're doing, so reverse-engineering the control systems of a successful, well-balanced game turns our to be much harder than you think. We eventually solved a lot of these problems, but not all of them, and when the publishers started to breathe down our necks we had to ship a game that was clearly still full of problems. Given another year we probably could have put a fun product on the shelves, but we simply didn't have another year. Unless the RotR team had several experienced fighting game veterans, I'm betting they made the same key mistake: assuming that a simple-looking game is actually simple to design and build, to become a fun product. Often it just isn't.
If you liked this then think about having a gander through my social media, and get yourself on my Patreon: www.patreon.com/KimbleJustice
The. Amiga version took atleast 6 discs to run lol
To be fair, in some sense this *was* the future of gaming: endlessly delayed, over-hyped, broken on release, and full of unfulfilled promises. All it's really missing is microtransactions.
Yeah is basically no man´s sky before its time.
2019 And it is still going.... "Anthem"
Cyberpunk now
@@locknstock9423 And now we have Outriders, the generic-cum-try hard edgelord looter shooter game that killed People Can Fly.
@@NebLleb Lmao, never even heard of it. Says alot really.
This game honestly made me stop reading gaming magazines for seven years.
I've never read one since. This game, just how. Way of the Exploding Fist on the speccy had infinitely better fighting mechanics than this.
The title change in Bad Influence was them literally offering every gaming journalist free artwork in the style of ROTR for free publicity.
They even made a robot version of Dave Perry for publicity. (there should be an image of it on the web, it's on the archive of his website for sure)
I’m sorry but I could not find it.
Was it shit at Mario too?
Ah, the classic lesson that top of the line graphics should never take priority over the actual gameplay.
You hear that, Sony and Microsoft?! You can polish a turd all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a *turd!*
Fantastic work! Great detail and research. I got wrapped up in the hype, as soon as it came out i popped down to my local rental picked it up for the MD and i was gutted with the first few minutes of playing it. One of the biggest turkeys i had the displeasure of playing.
+Oliver Harper Sushi X reviewer in EGM magazing never lied! Always spot on reviews!
Tell me about it, Harper. I recall something similar happened with the TV show Stargate Universe. The original 1994 Stargate movie by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich was a huge hit, and Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis were both successful TV shows that built on the mythology of the movie. Naturally, SG-U was hyped to hell and back as SyFy reinventing the wheel, and critics giving it tons of praise when it premiered. However, though, when people tuned in to watch it... Uh... What's the kinder term for a DISASTER? People hated it, including SG Fans, and the franchise was killed. Sound Familiar?
"It's not a conventional beat 'em up. We're using a lot of artificial intelligence... We'll definitely have one over Street Fighter II"
............BAHAHAHAHAHA! That is the most hilarious and embarrassing quote I think I've ever read in a gaming magazine! Brilliant!
It's amazing because in the 90s if the game did have artificial intelligence you would have needed a supercomputer cluster just to run the ai. In fact that's the sole reason why ai didn't become mainstream until this decade.
It's the equivalent of if Accolade said "Bubsy will destroy Super Mario World and Sonic 3".
Really? I think one lauding Rise of the Robots as "The first game to employ the services of an interior designer" probably beats it. You had a good run Street Fighter 2 but it's time to face the facts and look at those interiors!
Juganawt I cringed when I read that quote. I honestly wonder if it was all his genuine delusion or if he had a few scotches before sitting down for the interview.
It was almost worth this game being made just so that Amiga Power could write that review, legendary
6:36
Promising a novel, a movie, a line of toys and the kitchen sink reeks of how _Mighty No. 9._ tried to become a multimedia franchise.
"Wise of the Wobots started the hype back in nineteen nindy-twee"
I love the look of this game. There's something about early 90's CGI that is so charming to me. I wish the gameplay was better so I could enjoy it.
Wise of the Wobots.
wise fwum yow gwave
Well made vid, though. Interesting retrospective.
^ I think you mean wetwospective
turn CC on, it's Wives of the robots
seriously cant understand this guy without cc
I saved up birthday money and pocket money to buy this as a kid on PC. I can still remember the dawning sense of disappointment when I started playing it. I think I stopped playing after literally three fights. Gutted. It’s still one of my first memories of feeling truly ripped off.
Never would have guessed that this obscure little bad game occasionally reviewed on YT had THIS MUCH of a legacy back in its time. Thanks for the insight!
I recall the lead developer (Sean Griffiths?) on Gamesmaster, bullshitting about the gameplay, "it DOES play as well as as it looks", etc.
Unless the developers were all in denial, there's no way they could have thought the game was good. They had the mindset of 'we spent months rendering this shit, we need to get something back for all that time, effort and expense' and allowed it to be released.
Apparently they came clean later and admitted the game was dreadful.
These aren't reviews, they are little gaming history lessons. Great!
I bought all the hype hook line and sinker and then lost a bit of my soul when the game actually came out.
it looks so badass then i played the megadrive one since its easily accessible, and decided it isnt even worth trying to find the best version
It's a rite of passage for all gamers to go through their "bought into the hype, was utterly disappointed" moment. Mine was Street Fighter x Tekken.
Its true i remember this game being every where. Especially UK Gamesmaster magazine.
+TheIsolatedGamerz Yeah, I remember it being in Gamesmaster a lot. It's a shame actually that there's surprisingly few issues of Gamesmaster available on the Internet these days, otherwise I'm sure I could have found a hell of a lot more silly quotes (and possibly another atrocious review, although I can't remember/find what they gave it. It doesn't seem to have been reviewed on the Gamesmaster show itself, surprisingly...the Bad Influence kids reviewed it, scorched it and gave it 2/5 - I would have been quite curious to see what the Gamesmaster journalists gave it).
I have a few issues some where lying about. If i find the article ill take a picture of it and send it to you.
Gamesmaster was good show, Great to see another Brit doing a game review show. Keep up the work :)
I remember being bummed out because I couldnt get it.
EDGE magazine followed it extensively even having an entire issue dedicated to it
Kim Justice GamesMaster issue 25, January 1995, SNES version was given 45%, Amiga 600 version given 30%.
8:50 "It's the first beat-'em-up to use full ray-traced graphics throughout" - ...would've been, except they were beaten to the punch (by a couple of months) by One Must Fall: 2097 on the PC, which was actually a decent game IIRC (even seems to have a small cult following still). Also, why is that big robot at 21:18 doing the British "wanker" hand gesture at us?
Redhotsmasher I was thinking to myself "I seem to remember it wasn't bad, why are they saying it's terrible", then remembered it was OMF I played, not RoR. 👍
Maybe because he thinks you're a wanker? Go ask him and find out..
One Must Fall 2097 was the game I owned. I don't remember hearing about RotR, but why would I pay attention if I did hear the name?
One Must Fall was everything Rise wished it was.
I have come to realise that your reviews are the best on youtube BY FAR. the research you are putting in to them, the editing and the brilliant commentary. looking forward to another year of great reviews, cheers Kim!
Strange, I never ever played Wise of the Wobots before...
No Wodger, no Weginald, no Wudolph the Wed-Nosed Weindeer & definitely NO Wise of the Wobots!
Wise fwom your gwave
"Waste of time"? Is that it? I beleive it was Sega Power who called it a "curly great turd of hype, oozed from the putrid anus of the gaming industry", concluding with "Put THAT on yer box and sell it".
Hilariously, in 1999 my Amiga fanatic friend tried to impress me by telling he'd got "Rise of the Robots and everything" on it.
Are you two still friends?
Brilliant intro. Glad you can poke fun of your impediment. Its your trademark. Glad you realize this :)
That's true, his impediment and his alternative orientation is his trademark but not in a horrible freakshow kind of way, it's just Kim Justice and everybody accepts that...which is good.
Alan Weir The kind of people who can openly poke fun of themselves are the best kind of people, in my opinion.
I remember when I bought this game for PC when it came out. There were posters and promo material all over the store, and a massive row of shelves filled with only this game.
For a split second, the fact that all the shelves were *full* struck me, but I assumed it was because they were just keeping them stocked up.
I noticed a couple of employees smirking at me, but I just assumed they were just bored idiots with nothing better to do.
When I got home and played the game, it all made sense. This was the experience that taught me to see through the hype. Lesson learned.
Basically the No Man's Sky of the 90's.
Oh man, I wish Instinct Design would come back so we could see them and Hello Games come together!
Honestly this seems more like Mighty No. 9- you have a promising idea for a game, at some point the publisher/developer decides to make it available for every platform under the sun, the resources you would normally spend on building a good game go entirely into porting it across several different systems, and the result is something threadbare and boring.
Evan Waters In a way I can see this. Though in RotR's case, the developers were overpowered by the publisher. Looking back at it, that's one thing I can give to Mirage. Unlike MN9 or NMS, Rise was likely the victim of an overbearing publisher fucking up their original idea. Seriously, why the fuck did we need a Game Gear version?
Ubisuck, Fucktivision, Electronic Farts, Queer Enix have at least gameplay... not just walking around looking at stones.
No Man's Sky is "okay" (NOT good, but I wouldn't call it bad) and not as hyped compared to Rise of the Robots. Rise of the Robots is a HORRIBLE game. I give it a 1 out of 10. Also, it was hyped to all hell. ONE EXAMPLE: in EVERY comic book back then, there was a Rise of the Robots ad, from Marvel's Spider-man to DC's Batman to Image's Spawn, etc. etc. The ad campaign for Rise of the Robots was HUGE. Thats the reason it sold a lot despite being a horrible game
Awesome video as usual! Really informative and super interesting! You're quickly shooting up to be one of my favorite TH-cam channels! Keep it up Kim!
17:10 - Is that Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” in the background? Nice touch!
The second half of the video about games journalism was the best.
I've always been somewhat fascinated by this game. I wish more of the developers would actually talk about it because something must have gone seriously awry during development. Was it a case that they simply bit off more than they could chew, and didn't actually have the knowledge/experience needed to make a decent fighting game (see the Sega game X-Perts for an example of something like this)? Was development derailed by the need to constantly feed the intense media attention? Was it just intended as a cheap, low profile game that ended up being massively overhyped by the publisher and developed for too many platforms?
I think a post-mortem of the game's development could be quite interesting if the developers would only go on record.
Great look at this game. I remember buying this game as a kid with all the money I had painstakingly saved. All the hype and cool pictures were enough for me to trust that it is a good buy on release. Oh boy was I wrong and downright devastated. I still consider it one of the worst purchases I have ever made in my life.
Good video Kim. I was a freelancer for Future publishing between 1995 and 1997. I heard many a story about the hilarity that was ROTR. I also knew all about rival magazines propensity for 'winning' exclusives in return for a guaranteed 90%+ score. Magazines like C&VG were losing market share to Future magazines and it seemed ethics went out the window when it came to giving an honest appraisal of a game to a readership who had a limited income for buying them. As far as I know, Future magazines didn't fall into that trap but there were some pretty blatant attempts to buy review scores, that I witnessed from games PR firms in my time as a freelancer.
IGN before IGN. They're a repeat of the past if they're getting paid to bump up review scores of Call of Duty.
I remember the hype surrounding this game, it was insane.
It was towards the end of my Amiga's life...I was thirteen years old and forked out over £30 for the 1200 version. I couldn't believe how sh*t it was. It wasn't the never ending disk swapping - I was used to that, being a huge Monkey Island fan, it was the shocking, shocking gameplay. I tried to like it, I really did, but I was back playing Mortal Kombat 2 within hours.
I remember being an avid 'Amiga Power' reader, but on the month of its release, I (mistakenly) bought 'Amiga Action' with its absurdly high score, leading to two months' pocket money spunked.
Other colossal wastes of money: Gazza's Super Soccer on the Spectrum, a Barcode Battler (still don't understand what it was supposed to do).
Merry Christmas KJ, keep up the good work.
Loving your work Kim. Very interesting, brilliantly researched and put together. Thank you.
I really don't know how people con say Delphine Software's Shaq-Tu is the worst 16-Bit fighting game when something like Rise of the Robots exists. That game was at least passable, it just had somewhat delayed controls (that you can get used to!)
Here are a few quotes (translated) from german magazines for your amusement:
"The only time I laughed while testing the game was when I read this quote from the Game Gear-manual: 'Due to intelligent programming the enemies learn the player's attack strategies and adapt to it' [...] Only Dirk was able to have some fun with the game: 'I beat him' he told me after blindly hammering the two buttons on his game gear for 30 seconds." (Video Games magazin, they gave it 23% on the GG, 38% on the MD)
"What have I done that I have to test this game?! [...] In 1P mode it depends on luck if you win or lose" (Mega Fun Magazin, he gave it 38% on the SNES and 33 on the MD)
"The are lots of Special moves: One for every fighter, to be exact, and it almost never even works!" (Video games magazin in a seperate test for the SNES version, which received 40%)
The narrator sounds like a Elmer Fudd's British if somewhat camp sounding cousin. *jokes*. Top quality videos though Kim. Subscribed! :-)
How come some people consider Kim's way of speaking a speech impediment? I guess it's an accent from a region in England. I understood him perfectly, and I'm Argentinean (hence, a non-native speaker of English).
Because it's an Essex accent. A very strong one. It's why Jonathan Ross pronounces his "Rs" as "Ws".
@DR3ADER1 That's very interesting. We always learn new stuff.
The main blue robot look like Pepsiman lmao
Ok, this is a legitimate look at a terrible, terrible game. I remember the hype and the fallout, but I had no idea about the UK magazines praising it. Wow. So much shady games "journalism" back then.
Your videos are fantastic, Kim.
"The useful thing about researching rise of the robots.....oh my god" That was so funny the way you cut that bit together. Genius.
One Must Fall 2097 was released the same year and it was great robot fighting game. It's really dissapointing that people doesn't talk about at all. It seems it vanished in retro games history
I believe it’s also freeware now as well as the Sango Fighter games.
is that 3D Studio 4? Dos version lol....even before 3d studio MAX
Instantly recognised Stuart Campbell's writing style at the end there.
I remember all of this so well. I wonder how many people were turned off games entirely by this.
I'm not sure if anyones already asked but at around 7:00 in the video there seems to be a montage of death scenes or similar of the each robot killing each other instead of just cyborg. Where are those from? I've seen a version of the game that had failures for Cyborg but not those.
Any help? just curious to see them if they exist.
They're from the unreleased Arcade version of the game.
You seem to imply the 16 bit doesn't have 3d graphics. But I suspect no version has, they are all pre rendered sprites, aren't they?
Hello,
Where can we find magazine scans of the 3D model renders/illustrations? The ones that are not in-game.
So hyped. We were so terribly lied to with this game. We had all the mag coverage and even appearances on GamesMaster/Bad Influence were we pitched super hard saying it was "plays as good as it looks". A real low point for gaming journalism and trust was not recovered for a while for us who relied on them.
where did you get the death scenes from the arcade versión?
I come to this video for comfort Kim- you do such damn good work
I worked with Andy Clark, he's not particularly proud of this project, though i loved it when i was a kid. Btw, his latest success is Project Cars!
I played the arcade version at the Trocadero Leicester Square... Only it wasn't an arcade machine. It was a PC version in an arcade cabinet, as I learned when the game blue-screened.
1:30 Aw bless you honey. I’m a fan of anyone who can poke fun of themselves...and who also references Python.
such a great vid! I was sold hard on the hype back in the day and was extremely let down when I was finally able to rent the game. I kept hoping there was a port somewhere that did the game justice. I love the end where you discuss the details on the disparity among the reviews - something that needs more honest investigation even now on gaming sites
You are so good at what you do I don't understand how you don't own the genre and rule TH-cam.
Wow.....I forgot how utterly gash this game was - in the same way you subconsciously suppress bad memories, I couldn't even remember whether I'd played it. Within a second of seeing the "game" footage it all came flooding back. The "horse wank" quote sums it up perfectly. Great video again.
A terrific look at an abysmal game! I remember buying Rise 2, having not played Rise 1 but remembering the marketing campaign, and thinking the best part of the game was the Brian May song... that didn't appear in game but was on the CD. Great work! Keep it up!
Your videos are fantastic, you go right into the details, a real labour of love
Wasn't a huge fan of the game (I had the PC version) but! I remember there being a huge cardboard RofR robot in WH Smiths and I asked someone in there when they had finished it if I could have it (I was like 16? ish) - one day I walked past the shop and the guy came out and said could take it.. the thing was like 6ft tall and it was awesome having it in my bedroom. So I got that going for me.
Hey there, just curious? Do you still have that ROTR cardboard stand? Would you ever sell it? Cheers
Hi, no sorry, it's long gone!
Haha, no probs :)
Lee Nolan I would have burned it and wh smiths down, this game ruined my childhood.
I'm guessing the game had been skewered by the mags by that point! :D
LOL @ the sly viz book at the end @ 18.11
Which one is that, i have not seen it? It looks huge! (and i have most viz books)
Fantastic vid. If only there were more Amiga Powers and Jonathan Davies around these days to call out the likes of Bethesda, gaming might be in much better shape.
Great mini-documentary, Kim. Even my child self knew to rent this game and take it back immediately. Do you happen to have any info on what happened to Jonathan Davies (the Amiga reviewer who slated the game)? Was wondering if he was still out there working but I can't find anything!
And yet OMF 2097 was what everyone ended up playing, at least on PC.
I have spanish magazines giving 95/100 score to this shit. The first time I played on my PC I thought it was bugged, but no...the game was just a turd.
Kim wins again! Once i heard Kraftwerk “we are the robots” i thought my iPod was on but it was your video 👏🏽🙌🏾👏🏽🙌🏾
The first and last game I ever preordered. Lesson learned.
I seem to remember my dad had a colleague who was cool enough to be into games around for dinner that day, so it's a bit of an embarrassing memory.
I love the use of Kraftwerk songs on this video, very fitting.
Great comments about Edge magazine. Never has one publication done so much to make games seem so dull and tiresome.
Very well done. I remember this all too well, and I remember playing a 'demo' version that came on one of the Amiga magazine coverdisks, and thinking at the time what an utter pile of shite it was, and that there was no way I'd be buying the full version for any amount of money. And for that, I'm thankful. I remember reading reviews that sung it's praises, and coming to the conclusion that the publisher had paid for an advertisement to look like a review, particularly when other reviews were, umm, not as full of praise...
Many years later (in fact, only recently) I tried out the CD32 version. And I'm so glad I didn't waste my cash back in the day when I owned a CD32, or got the A1200 version for my A1200, or even got it to use as a door stop...
Thank you for a job well done, as usual. This game was, as I've seen you write, "as basic as a sinclair spectrum", and I hope you don't mind me quoting you there, but it just seems so perfect for that game, when compared to so many other absolute classics from the era.
My brother and I had this on PC back in the mid-90's. I remember it came on like 10 floppy disks. Believe me, the loading was not worth the wait. One of the worst game I've ever played. The only saving grace is I think we got the game on sale.
About CVG never being the same again after this: The revamp they had very soon after this (with Paul Davies from Mean Machines as editor) was goddamn glorious. It became the best games magazine available until it changed format again in the very late 90's when arcades died and EMAP tried to really water the product down.
I remember having a pirated copy of this with loads of disks...a totally broken game, shower of shite!
I remember Brian May talking about his 'contribution' on a Movies Games & Videos feature. He could not have looked more disinterested.
I live in the US and I'm glad to see that we weren't the only ones to have their gaming magazines giving this piece of crap nearly perfect scores. However, I remember some magazines like GamePro giving RotR glowing praise BEFORE IT WAS ACTUALLY RELEASED!
Perhaps instead of bribing publishers and reviewers, they should have put that extra money into making something good.
It would have been interesting how this game might have turned out had Time Warner not gotten their talons into it. It might have been rather decent, but i don't think it would have been the SFII beater they were claiming to be before Warner helped screw everything up.
Here from Matt McMuscles, and this history/review is amazing. I didn't realize that it was hyped so much in the UK. Also, that Brian May song that was supposed to be part of it is a banger.
omg those black sqaures flashes is hurting my head! Kimble stop those!
3D rendered graphics and fmv on a system that can only do 32/64 colors on screen. What can go wrong? Color banding is even worse when a gradient that's supposed to be one color has to be green and blue in some brightnesses because there aren't enough colors.
I feel lucky to have been too poor to have afforded full-price Amiga games in 1994. Often, the cover disks had been stolen from the magazines I would save up to buy, so I never got to play a demo either. A few years later, I tried the SNES version in our local video shop's Game Zone, where various consoles and many games could be played for only £1 per hour, far less seedy than the arcades on the seafront. I was stunned by the limited, frozen movement of the uncharismatic lead, immediately seeing through the aesthetics into the basic attack/defence options, no doubt belching my Nemesis drink in disdain. It was soon switched for another cart, probably Zombies, by the video shop staff behind the wall where the SNES consoles were hidden. I was suspicious of graphically-led games for a while, eventually finding peace with Sam and Max Hit the Road.
Thanks for the great video, by the way. I wonder how many equally broken droids appeared at other times, on other systems. I cannot think of an equal.
I'm still waiting for Brian May Soundtrack, since 1994. Those chords could be done by any guitar beginner with 1 week of experience.
"How about a novel written by Penguin?"
I read that one, I think. Found it in the library at one point. Vaguely remember it as being weird and interesting.
13 disks. 13. That is INSANE. Also, this is a great video as always!
What is Wise of the Wobots
Great video Kim. One of your best.
Ah, remembering a "friend" bringing this game over for the SNES back in the days. He told me it's great.
So we played a match. Then I laughed, showed him the door and never spoke to him again.
Good times.
Crazy_Borg
Wow. Please tell us more lies.
17:03 to see Rise of the Robots giving you the middle finger
Today marks the 25th anniversary of this game.
I bought this game as a kid for 60 bucks, probably the worst game purchase I ever made. Especially at a time when stores would not allow game returns or I would have returned it the day I purchased it.
I'm enjoying this video but please try to keep the text on screen at a minimum.
I came to watch and listen to a video after all. If you're showing a quote on screen, maybe it would be better to have you narrate it instead. Instead i have to always pause the video and read. Also, pick a more easy to read font. One that's not all in CAPS and make the text size a bit smaller. Other than that. I like this video. (I get that this was made in 2015 and hopefully the author has made good changes since then.)
I remember waiting years for this shit game on the mega drive I got it home put it in 10 minutes later I was back down woolworths demanding my money back this piece of trash was meant to change the future of fighting games lol only thing it changed was my temper in woolworths.
Can't believe you have dislikes on your vids man.. These are awesome and glad found channel. Keep up great work👍
I've never heard of you till today, but this was an interesting and well researched video. I like it.
We're 'lucky' that the arcade version is playable in MAME; neither of the two known arcade cabinets work. Interestingly there's also a version of Zool on the same/similar hardware but nobody has claimed to own a copy.
Hi there, I'm looking to document the remaining Rise arcade cabs if possible. I know one is the non working cab owned by Ordyne, but do you know who owns the second cab and is there a source of info on it please?
Cheers
Your accent belongs in a charles dickens novel, fam
+RSKullcrusha Wise fwom your wobot gwave
@@cathoderayguns I hadn't got any trouble in understanding him. When I was studying to become a translator of English, we used to have exercises where we were taught how to differentiate among the various accents of English-speaking countries (Scotland, Ireland, the USA, Australia, India, et cetera), and we also saw the different British accents, even though, for the two subjects dealing with the pronunciation of English, the so-called RP English was the standard (RP means "received pronunciation". This was the role model in the nineteenth century and nowadays it is spoken by around 2% of the total English population.) Greetings from Argentina.
Amiga Power was a great mag, used to look forward to it every month. Great video as always mate.
I read Computer and Video Games for a long time, and that includes this hype period. I still remember the hype for ROTR really well.
Good video and I think you managed to capture the epic crapiness of this true stinker and blot on video game history. This game truly was memorable for all the wrong reasons.
I unfortunately fell for the hype as so did many others. I remember vividly to this day how you couldn't escape the juggernaut of an advertising campaign. Then reality quickly hit after my older brother so kindly bought me the game for my Amiga 1200 at £30. Even though it wasn't my money, I actually felt bad for him after the initial excitement turned to horror.
I followed Amiga Power and had that very issue that you referred to. They were harsh but fair in their reviews but they absolutely brutalized ROTR and rightfully so. It remains for me, one the funniest and brutal reviews of any entertainment medium. It became blatantly obvious very quickly that something was seriously amiss when Amiga Power awarded it 5% and other publications 90% plus?!?! Alas, the truth transpired too late and many unfortunate gamers were too traumatised to fork out their pocket money for several years to come.
Fantastic work as always Kimble, everything surrounding this game is so hilarious in retrospect. Such a cynical case of the marketing being the focus as opposed to the actual product.
I remember seeing this game being advertised at a local flea market at the time. They had a big cardboard cutout of the protagonist "Coton" and were showcasing the PC version. The graphics were impressive and still kinda are in this video. I never played the game, though, as my computer was too shit. Never heard a peep about this game shortly after that.
21:14 that ape robot is a savage. To add more humiliation it's gonna beat its robot meat stick after beating the yellow dude.
i have this for the amiga, the box and manual are tidy and have all the discs, ill have to get the amiga going to try the game out
Could the game, if left to the original developers, have ever been any good? Was it destroyed by the money and the hype, or was its turkeyness inherent and unavoidable? Could some gameplay have been crowbarred into it, if gameplay rather than graphics/intro/Mr Angie/ports had been the focus? I've always been better at asking questions than answering them. Haven't I?
+Alex Stokoe Honestly, I'm leaning towards "no" on that one. Partly because the "original" versions of the game (Amiga/PC) are actually way worse than almost all of the ports for the MD, SNES and what have you (I'd only put the Game Gear version below them 'cause that's just a joke), but from the various articles that I read - a lot of the core things that make ROTR so lousy were there from the beginning, e.g. that supposed artificial intelligence and what-not. The money and hype didn't help, but I think it would have probably been a bit of a shite game anyway. It took a LOT to make a beat-'em-up any cop whatsoever on the Amiga/PC back then, considering how limited they were in that genre compared to consoles (better graphics, but most people were still using one-button joysticks).
+Kim Justice Yes, I like the logic of your reply. Shadow Fighter showed them how a beat-em-up COULD work with a one-buttoner, but only just. I never played Rise [I never bought an Amiga game until I[d] read [AP] and I cant recall that any pals did, either - everyone got SWOS for that Christmas. Ive got Rise on the Mega Drive now, and it is phenomenally bad. Further to this, I recall AP's 'Guide to the Future of Video Game Reviews', which was an on-the-nose satire of what was to happen. I always assumed it was based on the RoTR high marks debacle.
+Kim Justice This project reminds me of one I worked on for three years. (I won't say which.) It was a sports game, and all of our pre-production focus (and the focus of our conversations with publishers and, later, press) was on the distinctive look of the game and how it was going to be different from the competition, especially the market leaders.
There was just one problem. Nobody at the company knew how to make a game of this type. We didn't have the experience, and we didn't buy it in. We were (as a company) incredibly arrogant: the game type seemed simple, and we assumed we could get up to speed on the basics in no time and then exceed the competition in both looks and playability.
Big mistake. The game type in question may have looked simple, but it wasn't. There were a thousand problems that other developers had encountered and solved before that we had to solve for the first time. The biggest one was how to balance responsiveness with looks: the more physical realism you put into the players, the harder it was to make them sufficiently responsive for the game to feel fun rather than sluggish. (By contrast, a more cartoony, less realistic style would have given much greater latitude for responsiveness, because there would have been fewer verisimilitude constraints.)
We didn't honestly know where the fun came from, because finding the fun in a game is often the result of thousands upon thousands of man-hours of experimentation and tuning, and it's often REALLY hard to divine this stuff by reverse-engineering it from other products. Much of it is hidden away from you. Indeed, one thing we gradually learned is that in sports games (and fighting games are sports games of a sort) you often don't even realize as a player what it is you're doing, so reverse-engineering the control systems of a successful, well-balanced game turns our to be much harder than you think.
We eventually solved a lot of these problems, but not all of them, and when the publishers started to breathe down our necks we had to ship a game that was clearly still full of problems. Given another year we probably could have put a fun product on the shelves, but we simply didn't have another year.
Unless the RotR team had several experienced fighting game veterans, I'm betting they made the same key mistake: assuming that a simple-looking game is actually simple to design and build, to become a fun product. Often it just isn't.