I, Robot (1984)

Name:I, Robot
Number:216
Year:1984
Publisher:Atari
Developer:Atari
Genre:TPS
Difficulty:5/5
Time:2 hours
Won:No (88W/71L)

And so the first era of Atari comes to a close with the rather subdued release of I, Robot, name obviously taken from Isaac Asimov. It's a promising looking title, from the same guy who made Tempest, and it boasts a pretty impressive setup for a 1984 game, 3D polygons. None of this technical stuff, this is the sort of stuff you'd see running at a decent framerate a half decade later on home computers.

There are two modes, the first, is a doodle program. If you ever looked at the cards falling at the end of a game of solitaire and thought that was something you'd like to do with early 3D models from a game you never heard of, well, it's here. More importantly, is this game itself, in which you play as a robot rebelling against Big Brother, make your own jokes about what awful things the robot had to watch before rebelling. It's...unusual.

To start with, your objective on every screen isn't really to shoot things. Shooting things is optional, at least at the start. Instead, you walk over every red tile, turning it blue, until you turn all red tiles blue. Then, you jump over to the background of the screen and kill Big Brother, well, on this level anyway. Jumping is automatic, every time you have a tile you can jump to, your robot jumps. After doing this, a path is is made between the places you jumped. There is no manual jumping.

It sounds silly, but considering how weird this game is, it's oddly helpful.

To stop you, Big Brother periodically opens an eye in the background. When it's red, it shoots you if you are jumping. This is the primary obstacle throughout the game, other obstacles occur depending on the level. Birds are a common one, but usually you have to be in the air to get hit by them.

The first level is pretty generous about things, you get two areas introducing the basic concepts, your guy gives a little speech bubble about when the eye opens, where you should go and about the birds. There's also a teleport in the corner, which teleports you to later levels, seemingly just depending on if you unlocked them or not. I'll get to that in a moment.

After winning a level you get a variety of mini-games, firstly, a shoot 'em up section, where how many shots you can have on-screen, three, is suddenly important. Shoot asteroids to not get destroyed, or tetragrams to get points, Watch out for the sides, a life-saver will try to kill you. It divides sections up.

Level 2 is more keen to show you all about jumping, and there are no more speech bubbles. Your location and the location of red tiles are important. This one feels like one of those ball puzzles where you have to move into walls to get a ball to a certain location. It's also important to know when the eye is going to open, when it opens it doesn't matter at which stage of the jump you're in, you're dead. Green tiles just function as blocks.

At this point, I get mini-game number 2, a weird thing where you gather some tetragrams while avoiding a shuriken slowly destroying the ground behind you. It's inside Big Brother's pyramid and it feels like some sort of treasure run. It feels completely out of place, with the added bonus that dying here just advances you. (while taking that life, of course)

The next couple of levels aren't really worth mentioning, except for the space mini-game after level 4. This introduces a giant Moai head that spits out stakes. You have to shoot them or you die. It doesn't die, you just shoot it to cause it to not spit out stakes or shoot the stakes until the game decides you've done enough. This is not fun.

On level 5 the game starts ramping up the difficulty. Three lines, not too bad an eye, except, orbs constantly fly up, then towards the foreground. You're dodging these, and you get basically zero space. This is basically the place the casual player is likely to stop. I stopped playing legitimately and instead started using the teleport on level 1. Which seems to give you more points than if you played legitimately. This game has such a weird scoring system.

Level 6 introduces a new concept, destructible walls. Also, because I'm dying a lot more, the game helpfully tells me that the start buttons can change the viewport. Press 1 enough times, you get a side-scrolling view, which gives you more points. press 2 enough times, you get a bird's eye view. I usually just went for isometric. This level's a lot tricky than you'd think, the game is now pelting you with soccer balls. It's more difficult to dodge than it sounds, but that may be the usual problem of not playing this on proper hardware. (But given the game in question, playing on proper hardware is likely impossible for myself)

Level 7. The orange tiles slowly go down, if you then make a move to jump to them, they turn blue. There are homing mines on this level. I identify this stage as the time I'd stop playing for fun. You only shoot forward, and these mines have an annoying movement pattern where they lie at the bottom of a tile's edge or sneak up behind you and I don't think I won by actual skill here.

I don't really know if I'm messing this up because the game is genuinely hard or because I'm just not mastering it properly. Part of it is controls, it's a bit too loose with my setup, but I keep dying to the dumbest things. Take level 8. It's a series of lines you have to jump across, with the only real trouble being three sharks which go through the lines in an alternating series. I died a lot here, either to the sharks or the eye getting me making a jump.

Level 9 is all about dodging some mines. It's not that hard on the surface, the mines are slow and if you do get caught by one, it's removed from play. The real trouble is the eye, even though you really only jump 8 times, it's tricky. I died quite a few times here. After this, space sections and the little pyramid/treasure mini-game are getting more annoying, with the best way to survive being just to shoot as little as possible.

I stop playing at Level 12. I was tired of having to replay all the levels from level 5 onward and the supposed code that lets you advance earlier didn't seem to work. I'd have tried more if it was just the tile levels, but those mini-games were getting tedious. They're incredibly repetitive. The pyramid game is in addition to the space mini-game, which adds to the tedium. And with the space mini-game, you have a good shot of said level being one with the giant Moai head, just lovely.

Weapons:
Functionally, only there because the game needs a weapon. 1/10

Enemies:
More like traps than real foes, but an interesting variety nonetheless. 3/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
I was never happier in this game than when it gave me a new challenge to try to solve. The way the game is laid out is annoying, but when you finally see something new it feels worth it. 5/10

Player Agency:
Jankiness of playing in MAME aside, there are some clever ideas here that can be annoying. The whole shooting towards the background is a nice idea, until you have to destroy walls. You can stop a jump if you let go of the joystick, clever, until you do it by mistake trying not to make a series of jumps. 3/10

Interactivity:
Pretty much anything you can reach is either shootable or something you can jump over. 2/10

Atmosphere:
The 3D graphics carry it for an hour and that's about it. 2/10

Graphics:
Out of all the early 3D games I've played, this one embodied the most that feeling of "the future" that 3D was intended to envoke at the beginning. It's still ugly though. 2/10

Story:
A bunch of classic sci-fi concepts strung together in something resembling a fever dream. 1/10

Sound/Music:
Typical bloops and bleeps. 1/10

That's 20.

So, the reception. Allegedly, the reception of the game is quite poor. I've seen this said a few times, but I haven't actually seen any evidence of this. I didn't find any negative reviews, but perhaps I didn't look hard enough. It would be unusual, since I generally associate game reviewers with being easily wowed by graphics, and this is certainly a wower. Instead, everything is positive.

It is true that the game sold very few units, 1000 according to numbers I found online, but consider that this was the worst year for a company to be in the arcade business. (at the time, anyway) Atari didn't really need good, they needed a miracle. I don't quite know the business side of the arcade industry, even if there were non-stop lines around I, Robot machines, that might not have done them a lick of good.

That said, I do think that modern look backs at the game are a bit generous. It's still clearly flawed. The space mini-game is just unnecessary and just adds unnecessary length to a game that did not need to work for length at all. I don't like the pyramid mini-game, but without the space mini-game that's merely an occasional nuisance rather than another nuisance.

It wouldn't be surprising at all to find some game that accidentally did this, but without the unnecessary crap added in. This is a deceptively simple concept when you tear away the weirdness of it. Tile puzzle games like this are a dime a dozen, and someone has to have stumbled onto the same formula.

Side note, I tried to start Rejection, the FM Towns game this week, but it wouldn't work. I did what you always do with a FM Towns game, mount the CD in a virtual drive, then insert a floppy in the emulator. But once I got to the menu, nothing seemed to happen. If anyone has a clue as to what I'm doing wrong, I'd appreciate the help, because otherwise it looks like I won't be playing it anytime soon.