Robot Arena is a classic, which is why i am proud to announce the release of the ROBOT ARENA NFT COLLEC- *gets shoved into Metal Skull arena's pit by a robot*
You'll be happy to know that Emergency is actually cheating, a little! @@jauwn IIRC it's one of the few default bots with the glitched default armour type people call 'double strength aluminum' and similar names (available by just never selecting one). It displays as and has the same weight as aluminum, but significantly more HP! Emergency's also got additional metal plates mounted in strategic locations, so with those combined it's surprisingly tanky on top of just being a very well-built bot! Presumably they changed the stats on aluminum armour at some point in development but forgot the default for not having made a selection was a separate listing.
I found a big box copy of Robot Arena 1 at a software store back in 2001. Played the hell out of it. I knew it wasn't a good game but I still loved it. When RA2 was announced I convinced my parents to let me cut school for the day so I could go to CompUSA and buy it the day it came out. RA2 was a big deal to me, many of the friends I made 20 years ago are still my friends to this day. I was big into modding the game. (I am the "Radio F" mentioned in the part description for the AI parts I see you patched in, lol.) I released expansive AI mods to the game that featured dozens of new robots to fight. For the game's 20th anniversary last year I released the final installment of the AI pack, something that had been in development hell for 19 years. I also beta tested RA3 before its release. There was a lot wrong with the game to put it lightly. I diligently noted everything I ran into and submitted the reports to the developer... they addressed a grand total of 0 things I noted. Why even bother having testers if you're not going to fix anything?
Man, just to think we might have already talked on the GameTechMods forum like 20 years ago (check my other comment on here for context)...imagine, that's kinda crazy, haha. So cool to hear your story with the game!
@@catsinbed7634 There is definitely a non-zero chance of that! I was on all the boards back then, AceUplink, ARC, RA-Reborn, and the official boards on the RAcom website. I was actually a mod on AceUplink for a fleetingly brief and tumultuous time. XD
I have so much hate-r-aid for current gen software devs and Windows 10 (forced migration/pushing a data collection revenue model) Devs just either refuse to listen, cannot stop adding useless features/moving gui objects around, or if they are a good one, getting bullied by publishers/management. (to be clear the bullying if not their fault) It is very depressing to have had massive enthusiasm, put your all into trying to either help or volunteer your time to do things like beta test, and then have them not even have the respect to tell you they arent interested. I mean an outright rejection is better than making you eat dead air. The only way I know you can really stick it to them is decompile their game, fix it, and give back to the other users for free. It is so bad sometimes people will line up to donate.
Hi RadioF! I love that I run into you on various corners of the net related to robot combat. Clutch1 back in the day, here. Gosh the days playing RA2 was so awesome… so cool to see a video about it coming out in ‘24. Hope all is well, cheers.
@@keith_5584 Open source it all! Pretty sure at least part of the problem is just business in general (especially tech) being so horribly consolidated by investment firms and...just hardcore hyper-capitalists out to take the fewest risks for the biggest returns. The easiest way to do that is to treat your employees like machines and your customers like marks for a scam. Windows 11 chased me to full-time Linux desktop last year and I have no regrets.
"We simply cannot afford to pass up the extra visibility we'll gain from having a new release title available during the Steam summer sale" Uhh.... guys, ya know that is *the worst* possible time to release a game right? People are looking for sales, not new releases. There's a lot more traffic during the sale season sure, but I guarantee you they're not looking at the new releases tab.
When you make a “bargain bin” game that’s so good and entire community is created around it and someone like me, who was a good couple of years away from being born when it came out, can call it one of his favourite games of all time is astounding.
Another fun thing to note about Robot Arena 2 is the game has an extremely dedicated modding community. Not only is the DSL mod used by the majority of the playerbase to expand bot but there are mods allowing you to play robots from Robot Wars, Battlebots and more 😊 Was surprised but happy to see this as i recently enjoyed your nft games video! Your video is a fun, nicely informed video on the Robot Arena series! RA3 will always hurt as someone who played it when it was new 😅
I think robot combat is slowly making a comeback with 3d printing, rc equipment, and Arduinos being pretty affordable. The 250lbs monsters certainly cost a ton but the smaller classes you can make with a pretty small budget.
Love this! My uncle was actually on the team for Overkill, one of the robots on Battlebots in the early 2000s. Was cool as hell to see that on TV as a kid, and games like this only fed that excitement and interest. The amount of effort and quality into games like this feels so very of its time too, for some reason it felt like tons of devs back then weren't afraid to try and punch above their weight.
Man, I feel like I just got back from school, my hot pocket is in the microwave, and I'm throwing MiB into the VCR! Love that 2000 era is considered retro now. I'm finally old! 🎉🥳🎉
Oh god, I had Robot Arena 2 (or Design & Destroy) as a kid when I didn't understand English properly so I just hit buttons and whatever I was allowed to do. Never really dug into the meat of this game but just had childish fun creating stupid monster robots that didn't work at all in the Bot Lab. If I recall correctly, the game also had local multiplayer but you had to give your custom robots some weird inputs so two people could play on the same keyboard. Thanks for unlocking another memory!
Yeah I had originally had a quick section in the video where I explained how to do local multiplayer with the different key bindings but ended leaving that on the cutting room floor. The game was so fun! In hindsight it doesn’t have a whole lot of content but the freedom you have makes that small amount of content highly replayable
@@jauwn This game, CIV IV in Hot-Seat and TOU were childhood bangers when a friend came over! We didn't care how wonky it was or how little content there actually was, we were just happy to have fun!
I was not expecting this video, but it's a pleasant surprise. This game was so much of my childhood. My brothers and I spent countless hours building all sorts of different robots (many of which based on stuff we saw on Robot Wars and Battlebots), and to this day we still boot whenever we get back together. Truly a unique game - for all its flaws (and there are many) I've yet to see a game do robot combat as well as Robot Arena 2 did.
Pro-tip, if the camera keeps getting lost, lock the game's FPS to 60. For whatever reason on modern systems the camera desyncs from the gameplay at higher framerates
I used to love Robot Wars (the UK version). Sadly, I found that the more popular it got, the more like a sport it became, complete with wrestling-style intros and stuff, and the more my interest waned. I never even knew there were spinoff games.
Nowadays robot combat is kind of boring as a spectator since the robots move so outlandishly fast the fights are over in a second. Sure they still have heavyweight classes but the most competition is at the micro bot level. So I'm not sure if this will ever come back as a "mainstream sport", it really was a product of 1999-2003 and then it just died
I was also a Robot Wars fan, and honestly I still really enjoy Battlebots, I know people beef on it due to Discovery meddling, but the heart of a bunch of nerds super excited to throw colossal death machines at each other still really shines through and I find myself rooting for teams!
Battlebots is still going but without "late night cable" being a thing anymore, the shows are relegated to the Discovery Plus platform. So they exist but it's way more niche then it was when back in the early 2000s when there was nothing else to watch
How is it that I have never heard of this game? I was crazy for combat robots when I was a kid and it had motivated me to pursue engineering and formed the person that I am now. I know I would've played this game so much as a kid
the saddest part of RA3 is they literally could have just ported RA2 over and just updated the graphics and added a couple QOL adjustments, called it good, and it would have been a smash hit.
This is 100% true and I think that’s what they tried to do originally since it re uses a lot of the same parts from RA2 but at some point they really screwed up
Thank you for doing this, this is so nostalgic. I remember spending countless nights with my friend just coming up with robot designs. The moment I figured out how to route controls to steer bots (by peeking at the premade bot designs which is something you can do by manipulating the files), my mind was blown. I haven't had the same enduring sense of discovery in any game before or since.
The old intro is back, yay Great video as always, it's simply amazing how many obscure, but very good nonetheless, games there are These video reviews are always a joy to watch, thank you, Jauwn
I'm so happy to see a video about this gem of a game, I still to this day think it's the best Robot Wars-type game out there, even better with the Robot Arena 2 DSL mod. If you haven't heard the absolute banger that is the main menu music, what are you doing, the mod is free and comes with a download of the game
robot arena seems to have the same kinda soul as roller coaster tycoon. great video jauwn! break free from the blockchains, its way more fun to hear you passionate
God, this game was my freaking childhood. The dopamine hit of getting doing damage to the enemy internals and you see the sparks fly when it happens. Oof, that's the shit right there.
Man the way this game was described I would think it was Armored Core. Haven't played the new one (yet) but I remember sinking hundreds of hours in AC2 back when I was a kid on my PS2. I also fondly remember the PSP game AC Nexus (I think) but it had the crazy gameplay feature where you could program the AI to pilot your bot for you and given the limited control space on a PSP it was something I tried immediatly and it was honestly kind of more fun that way. You felt like an engineer designing your robot and not only were you tinkering with the parts but also working to make the AI use the design to your vision and intent. Watching the cinematic camera dance around to catch the action as your bot battles and having the nail biting thrill of seeing if your combination of AI programming and mech design won out and finally getting more prize money for that next upgrade and then having to sit down and tinker with it again was just amazing. Great video and glad to see a more real world version of robot battles is still so popular!
my friend had this game when we were kids, and I remember one of his older brothers made a bot that was essentially an unpowered cube with no controls that was so mashed full of pistons that it would slowly shake for like 20 seconds until the physics engine just breaks and it flies around the arena tearing itself apart and possibly destroying whatever it touched, the pistons would look like they were flying out of it and orbiting around the box despite never actually being outside of it. it would do that for a solid like, minute or so, until the bot took enough damage from its high speed flight that parts broke and the glitch settled down, leaving it stuck in place and inevitably deemed immobilized. watching that cube explode around the arena and hoping it touches one of the enemies is definitely a core childhood memory of mine. they called that bot WonderBox and both me and my friend never could quite replicate it, we've had other bots do similar things, but nothing compares to the extremes of the original, and "WonderBox-ing" became the term we'd use to describe whenever a game's physics engine would break or objects clipping into other objects began violently shaking around. I think the original files for the WonderBox was lost at some point when they updated the operating system on that PC (there was a reason we were trying to replicate it, but it may have been because we wanted to have two WonderBoxs fight each other), but there is a chance it may still be buried in those files somewhere.
Holy hell I completely forgot about this game and the amount of nostalgia wave slamming me is insane! Specifically the texture deformations with the numbers floating trigger it the most. omg and the drop-n-drop music files into the game.
Holy heck, this game and Roboforge got me into being an engineering dork. I LOVED the entire genre of "make robots to smash into each other but like be smart about it."
Oh cool, I played the demo of Roboforge -- always wanted to get back into it, but never figured out how to get the free version that's being distributed now working under Wine, and I don't have any Windows machines any more.
@@05Matz If I remember correctly Roboforge basically runs entirely in Java, So that may help narrow down the compatibility. I think also if you can get a linux environment that is happy to run a lot of XP era games it should truck along just fine. The altervista site for the game should be the most up to date.
ALSO, the game had these cheat codes that let you attach stuff like a hover-craft engine and a freaking cannon (among other things but I forget all the stuff that gets added). Of course it wasn't allowed in multiplayer, but it was ridiculously fun to use and absolutely broken as hell. I miss the days when game devs put cheats into their games like that.
I discovered your channel through the algorithm feeding me the nft videos but im subscribing because of these retrospectives sprinkled in. Congrats on blowing up over the last year. The way you flow talking about either sibjects is very enthralling.
RCT2 was great, I played that a ton as well. RCT3 came out just a year after RA2 but I didn't really like it as much as the 2nd and 1st games in the series; quite a bit changed. It had a nice charm to it though, and some of the custom rides people have made are pretty impressive.
Oh shit, I remember playing this as a kid in typing classes, since absolutely no one involved gave a damn about keeping things on-track, especially not the teachers. I still ended up learning how to type super-fast, but not from that class or the method they were trying to teach (my go-to now is a "raptor claw" type thing with only index/middle fingers and thumbs). All that class taught me was combat robots are sick as hell, and I have zero regrets. Thanks for reminding me what this game is called, Jauwn, gonna see about picking this up again.
@@icantthinkofagoodusername5564 Not sure, this wasn't a regular elementary school though if I recall right, it was one of those community class things where you sign up and go there of your own volition. If I were to guess, I'd assume it was either a kid bringing in the stuff to install it via physical media, or the internet there not being restricted because the people running the place didn't know jack about IT, as was and still is often the case.
When I saw the video name, I was excited to see someone review Robot Wars, a game I played obsessively when I was 6 years old. I was REALLY disappointed to see it was some other game I'd never heard of, so the twist reveal halfway through the video had me literally cheering at my screen. Thank you, Jauwn!
98k subscribers!! It is, what, less than six months ago you were at 3K and I was so excited to see you go up to 4k!!!!!! Now you’re at 98k?!?!?! Holy smokes, you are crushing it!!! So so so impressed and you definitely earned them and more!!!
🎉 yeah the growth this year has been tremendous! It's also great to see so many of the same commenters all these months later, including yourself. It's a great feeling to know the OGs are still around!
Just discovered your channel yesterday and have been binging your videos ever since! You've earned yourself a subscriber and I hope u reach that 100k mark!
The combo of the UI, the visuals, the physics etc reminds me of SO many old pc games I obsessed over as a kid. These things just have a *vibe* to them.
As someone that spent a good chunk of my early internet life going balls deep into the stock and DSL metagame it still holds a place in my heart despite no longer playing it once everyone started to focus on the IRL format that I'm partially responsible for If you get the chance, look at the some of the more extreme stock designs, there is a legitimate beauty in their intricate chaos
This just got me hyped for the next season of Battle Bots. What a beautifully simple premise, the spectacle of blood sports without the moral qualms of things actually dying needlessly
@@jauwn Hah, a comic i used to read had a character who loved terrible coffee more than good coffee because a terrible cup evokes memories of everything better but the good one is just there by itself.
No way, really? I’m legitimately the same way - I love terrible coffee because it brings back memories of when I worked a shitty office job and lived off of the terrible coffee
@@jauwn Hah it was a prequel book to the D&D based webcomic Order of the Stick...though admittedly the main villain was the bad coffee enjoyer. The ability to find the good in the bad has always resonated with me even if I am not great at it myself.
YESSSS I LOVED Battlebots as a kid and had TONS of fun on RA2!! The DSL and BBEANS and idk community are really cool but they've been at it for so long that all their builds are hyper-optimized 😅 I am going to be checking RR2 ASAP, thanks for the rec Jauwn! ❤
Perfect example of how fun game mechanics are far more important than flashy graphics. I wish I knew about this game back then, I would have played the hell out of it _and_ used the sound effects as audio for my PC system notifications. 😉 I miss those good old days of drag & drop audio files, both into & out of games... with games like this I'd often throw a few extra music tracks in so I didn't get sick of the in-game soundtrack playing on repeat for hours at a time. Nothing worse than ruining a kick-arse soundtrack by listening to it so much that it loses all meaning.
Aww man. I used to rent these two games from our library in the early 00's. Robot Arena 1's "military" opponent scared me (and my brother, who played coop with me at the time) because they insinuated that he normally uses explosives and miniguns in his bots but didn't for our fight. I miss these kind of games especially for what they did with the hardware at the time. Seriously watching these had me going through a nostalgia memory dump of moments I had forgotten from over two decades ago.
Would love to hear more about the TCs for this game! As a kid I adored Robot Wars and even though the game was mid I still put a ton of time into it. The madcap creations in the robot battling genre really set the stage for me to start making weird gizmos and gadgets in 3d modeling!
i still remember playing this game in 2003 with my dad cuz he loved robot wars. good times edit thanks for also showing some of RA1 i had almost completely forgotten RA1 that was probably the first video game my eyes ever saw. my dad liked playing that game and would be holding me while playing it sometimes. i still remember that cover art picture. wild. thanks for the nostalgia trip
Watching your video more, it was actually the first Robot Arena game that I had. I remember the chassis having slots and just putting battering rams to smash into the other guys. I remember enjoying it as a kid, but it's probably because it was the only PC game I had at the time.
I think I remember making a metal shoebox with long axes off the long sides and high power wheels on the short sides. I set up a command to let it turn in place, and I'd just dervish, and anything that got close enough would get pummeled.
Robot Arena 1 is what I remember in my childhood. It was basically a solved game with pneumatic spikes on the front being the best DPS meta. It ran at about 10 frames per second on my uncle's backup computer. Explosions would drop that down to 4.
worthy of note is Robot Combat might be a bit off the mainstream, Battlebots is still going to this day on TV and NHRL is free to watch on RUclips consisting of smaller, but just as competetive weighclasses
I must say, I've really been enjoying these retro reviews you've been pushing out! Unlike a lot of game reviewers who don't really review the games they're talking about and just make vague criticisms and jokes, you're quite thorough with what your reviews on the games in an entertaining and engaging way. I can't wait to see what you have next in this series! And, if it isn't too much of an ask, do you take suggestions?
I played this game. It was fun pretending to design BattleBots. There is a damage bug with the spike weapons, that allows you to quickly destroy your opponents if you ram into them at a slight angle and keep driving into them.
Fun fact you can actually cheese the 30-minute timer by backing out of the tournament and then going back in. It will reset to 30 minutes but remember your fixes. So you can easily get back up to full health
What I love about Robot Arena 2 is how much this game is a glitchy, unfinished mess where you can create some pretty impressive designs if you know what you are doing or listen to the community. Some glitches I remember: * The 7kg razor tip is more powerful than the 30kg sledgehammer due to how damage values work. * Want to stack Batteries? Just get a pixel-perfect position over the first one and save space * Don't select your armour type when creating a bot, and you'll have a machine with the strongest armour in the game. This is referred as Double Strength Aluminium by the community * All motors consume the same amount of power, so stick on those Powered Z-Teks without any worries. * Want lower wedges? Just use a servo and adjust the position. Don't power it for the best results
Great review for a great game! I got it during the summer when I was 9 or 10, and, around the same time, I broke my wrist and had to wear a cast for a month, so playing it was pretty much all I did that month. Still have the disc. I didn't know the game had a modding community; it might be time to bust it back out...
I am surprised & outraged that 'Robot Wars' never contacted the Developer of 'Robot Arena 2' to make a Higher Budget Update of this Game Imagine what we could have... We could have Actually Circular Robots! XD
I spent so many hours as a kid making goofy robots in Robot Arena 2. Loved the freeform design they introduced with that one, and I basically stuffed my hard drive with mods once little me learned how. RIP Lu Tze.
Love this game. Spent a lot of time with it as a kid. I always started with Walrus and just put a ton of ice picks on the front rammer. I could easily beat everything except Grizzly (that bot was always OP in my opinion). Really enjoyed playing their "career mode" because there was a glitch where if you closed the game in the between match repair screen you could reset the repair clock but keep all the repairs you made, so it was possible to always be completely repaired between rounds. Also I remember if you made a very light robot with a very powerful drivetrain you could actually drive up the wall and around the ceiling because the physics engine was a bit janky. EDIT: speaking of robot combat games, does anyone remember Roboforge? It was like this game except you had to program an AI for your bot. I tried to play it but could never figure it out. Seems like the kind of thing that people who are smarter than me would have a ton of fun with.
It's nice to hear you talk about actually good games, hope you'll make more non-nft content in the future too. But, yknow, also hoping for more nft scum highlights)
I won a tournament in this game in a middle school engineering class. My design was a big titanium box covered in spikes. people would try and hit me and they'd end up spiking themselves and giving me tons of points
A game 20 years ago is way more fun than all nft games combined
It needs a steam os port
@@SweetToddyou mean Linux port?
@@TheNameIsSR both
yeah unfortunately I don't think anyone has ever managed to get the game to run properly on Linux
@@fernadogonzalez2940 that would be the same thing though, but I get what you're trying to say
Robot Arena is a classic, which is why i am proud to announce the release of the ROBOT ARENA NFT COLLEC- *gets shoved into Metal Skull arena's pit by a robot*
Imagine if it was an Easter egg where there's also an NFT-themed robot team
Each robot is an NFT, and it costs as much to mint as it would cost in real life to buy all the parts. If the robot is destroyed, NFT is burned.
@@ShinoSarna Sounds like a good investment to me! All risk, no reward!👍
@@DarkOmegaMK2 Have fun staying poor! FungiBots will soon be the next AOL! Or even the next PDF!
@@ShinoSarna The next RAR?
Getting destroyed by the unstoppable juggernaut that was Emergency is a shared memory of thousands of kids.
it still fucks me up to this day
You'll be happy to know that Emergency is actually cheating, a little! @@jauwn
IIRC it's one of the few default bots with the glitched default armour type people call 'double strength aluminum' and similar names (available by just never selecting one). It displays as and has the same weight as aluminum, but significantly more HP!
Emergency's also got additional metal plates mounted in strategic locations, so with those combined it's surprisingly tanky on top of just being a very well-built bot!
Presumably they changed the stats on aluminum armour at some point in development but forgot the default for not having made a selection was a separate listing.
I knew about the glitched armor on your own bots but I had no idea Emergency used it too! What a fun fact
I found a big box copy of Robot Arena 1 at a software store back in 2001. Played the hell out of it. I knew it wasn't a good game but I still loved it. When RA2 was announced I convinced my parents to let me cut school for the day so I could go to CompUSA and buy it the day it came out. RA2 was a big deal to me, many of the friends I made 20 years ago are still my friends to this day.
I was big into modding the game. (I am the "Radio F" mentioned in the part description for the AI parts I see you patched in, lol.) I released expansive AI mods to the game that featured dozens of new robots to fight. For the game's 20th anniversary last year I released the final installment of the AI pack, something that had been in development hell for 19 years.
I also beta tested RA3 before its release. There was a lot wrong with the game to put it lightly. I diligently noted everything I ran into and submitted the reports to the developer... they addressed a grand total of 0 things I noted. Why even bother having testers if you're not going to fix anything?
Man, just to think we might have already talked on the GameTechMods forum like 20 years ago (check my other comment on here for context)...imagine, that's kinda crazy, haha. So cool to hear your story with the game!
@@catsinbed7634 There is definitely a non-zero chance of that! I was on all the boards back then, AceUplink, ARC, RA-Reborn, and the official boards on the RAcom website. I was actually a mod on AceUplink for a fleetingly brief and tumultuous time. XD
I have so much hate-r-aid for current gen software devs and Windows 10 (forced migration/pushing a data collection revenue model) Devs just either refuse to listen, cannot stop adding useless features/moving gui objects around, or if they are a good one, getting bullied by publishers/management. (to be clear the bullying if not their fault)
It is very depressing to have had massive enthusiasm, put your all into trying to either help or volunteer your time to do things like beta test, and then have them not even have the respect to tell you they arent interested. I mean an outright rejection is better than making you eat dead air.
The only way I know you can really stick it to them is decompile their game, fix it, and give back to the other users for free. It is so bad sometimes people will line up to donate.
Hi RadioF! I love that I run into you on various corners of the net related to robot combat.
Clutch1 back in the day, here. Gosh the days playing RA2 was so awesome… so cool to see a video about it coming out in ‘24.
Hope all is well, cheers.
@@keith_5584 Open source it all! Pretty sure at least part of the problem is just business in general (especially tech) being so horribly consolidated by investment firms and...just hardcore hyper-capitalists out to take the fewest risks for the biggest returns. The easiest way to do that is to treat your employees like machines and your customers like marks for a scam.
Windows 11 chased me to full-time Linux desktop last year and I have no regrets.
"We simply cannot afford to pass up the extra visibility we'll gain from having a new release title available during the Steam summer sale"
Uhh.... guys, ya know that is *the worst* possible time to release a game right? People are looking for sales, not new releases. There's a lot more traffic during the sale season sure, but I guarantee you they're not looking at the new releases tab.
Oh my god I would have been OBSESSED with this game as a kid
Youre never too old to be obsessed with robot arena
the builder looks so good for something back then. i was pretty young when i saw the show on tv, never saw any games, especially not This gem
Well, I was obsessed with this game as a kid, and I am glad Jauwn reminded me about it ❤
I got obssesed with Quake when I am fuck ton younger than it, so theres that.
When you make a “bargain bin” game that’s so good and entire community is created around it and someone like me, who was a good couple of years away from being born when it came out, can call it one of his favourite games of all time is astounding.
Another fun thing to note about Robot Arena 2 is the game has an extremely dedicated modding community. Not only is the DSL mod used by the majority of the playerbase to expand bot but there are mods allowing you to play robots from Robot Wars, Battlebots and more 😊
Was surprised but happy to see this as i recently enjoyed your nft games video! Your video is a fun, nicely informed video on the Robot Arena series! RA3 will always hurt as someone who played it when it was new 😅
RIP Lu-Tze
I think robot combat is slowly making a comeback with 3d printing, rc equipment, and Arduinos being pretty affordable. The 250lbs monsters certainly cost a ton but the smaller classes you can make with a pretty small budget.
It absolutely is! I have been building some 150g bots for the last year or so
Love this! My uncle was actually on the team for Overkill, one of the robots on Battlebots in the early 2000s. Was cool as hell to see that on TV as a kid, and games like this only fed that excitement and interest. The amount of effort and quality into games like this feels so very of its time too, for some reason it felt like tons of devs back then weren't afraid to try and punch above their weight.
That’s so awesome!!
11:16 You can do WHAT to the bot??? 😳
@@JWhite-qi5zv Edge
Man, I feel like I just got back from school, my hot pocket is in the microwave, and I'm throwing MiB into the VCR!
Love that 2000 era is considered retro now. I'm finally old!
🎉🥳🎉
Hell yeah! It’s finally our turn to say “…back when I was a kid…”
Man don't remind me
Oh god, I had Robot Arena 2 (or Design & Destroy) as a kid when I didn't understand English properly so I just hit buttons and whatever I was allowed to do. Never really dug into the meat of this game but just had childish fun creating stupid monster robots that didn't work at all in the Bot Lab. If I recall correctly, the game also had local multiplayer but you had to give your custom robots some weird inputs so two people could play on the same keyboard.
Thanks for unlocking another memory!
Yeah I had originally had a quick section in the video where I explained how to do local multiplayer with the different key bindings but ended leaving that on the cutting room floor.
The game was so fun! In hindsight it doesn’t have a whole lot of content but the freedom you have makes that small amount of content highly replayable
@@jauwn This game, CIV IV in Hot-Seat and TOU were childhood bangers when a friend came over! We didn't care how wonky it was or how little content there actually was, we were just happy to have fun!
Man, I had a bunch of fun games as a kid, especially those to play with friends. Real shame that I never got to play this game, would've been so cool.
I was not expecting this video, but it's a pleasant surprise. This game was so much of my childhood. My brothers and I spent countless hours building all sorts of different robots (many of which based on stuff we saw on Robot Wars and Battlebots), and to this day we still boot whenever we get back together. Truly a unique game - for all its flaws (and there are many) I've yet to see a game do robot combat as well as Robot Arena 2 did.
wedge
@@q09z😂😂😂
Pro-tip, if the camera keeps getting lost, lock the game's FPS to 60. For whatever reason on modern systems the camera desyncs from the gameplay at higher framerates
If I ever try to run it on my system I’ll keep that in mind.
Love this style of video, Jauwn. You really got the whole package here!
Thank you! Always trying to do something a bit new with each video so that I don’t stagnate talking about NFT crap
Modding this game for modern systems is a must and greatly expands the scope including adding old robot wars robots like Razor.
I love seeing you cover these bargain bin early 2000s games. Please keep doing it Jauwn, I love the crypto game vids but these are awesome too.
I used to love Robot Wars (the UK version). Sadly, I found that the more popular it got, the more like a sport it became, complete with wrestling-style intros and stuff, and the more my interest waned. I never even knew there were spinoff games.
Nowadays robot combat is kind of boring as a spectator since the robots move so outlandishly fast the fights are over in a second. Sure they still have heavyweight classes but the most competition is at the micro bot level. So I'm not sure if this will ever come back as a "mainstream sport", it really was a product of 1999-2003 and then it just died
I was also a Robot Wars fan, and honestly I still really enjoy Battlebots, I know people beef on it due to Discovery meddling, but the heart of a bunch of nerds super excited to throw colossal death machines at each other still really shines through and I find myself rooting for teams!
Battlebots is still going but without "late night cable" being a thing anymore, the shows are relegated to the Discovery Plus platform. So they exist but it's way more niche then it was when back in the early 2000s when there was nothing else to watch
How is it that I have never heard of this game? I was crazy for combat robots when I was a kid and it had motivated me to pursue engineering and formed the person that I am now. I know I would've played this game so much as a kid
the saddest part of RA3 is they literally could have just ported RA2 over and just updated the graphics and added a couple QOL adjustments, called it good, and it would have been a smash hit.
This is 100% true and I think that’s what they tried to do originally since it re uses a lot of the same parts from RA2 but at some point they really screwed up
Thank you for doing this, this is so nostalgic. I remember spending countless nights with my friend just coming up with robot designs. The moment I figured out how to route controls to steer bots (by peeking at the premade bot designs which is something you can do by manipulating the files), my mind was blown. I haven't had the same enduring sense of discovery in any game before or since.
The old intro is back, yay
Great video as always, it's simply amazing how many obscure, but very good nonetheless, games there are
These video reviews are always a joy to watch, thank you, Jauwn
I'm so happy to see a video about this gem of a game, I still to this day think it's the best Robot Wars-type game out there, even better with the Robot Arena 2 DSL mod. If you haven't heard the absolute banger that is the main menu music, what are you doing, the mod is free and comes with a download of the game
i remember this game! so much fun for this engineer. Even the cannonball cheat weapon was fun.
robot arena seems to have the same kinda soul as roller coaster tycoon. great video jauwn! break free from the blockchains, its way more fun to hear you passionate
Glad to see the intro come back! Great video as always
God, this game was my freaking childhood.
The dopamine hit of getting doing damage to the enemy internals and you see the sparks fly when it happens. Oof, that's the shit right there.
it's SO satisfying
BRUH!!! Thank you so much for the UK Robot Wars shout out, that was one of my FAVOURITE shows as a kid!! COME ON HYPNODISC!!!!
P.S. The intro on this video is my favourite of your intros :D
Man the way this game was described I would think it was Armored Core. Haven't played the new one (yet) but I remember sinking hundreds of hours in AC2 back when I was a kid on my PS2. I also fondly remember the PSP game AC Nexus (I think) but it had the crazy gameplay feature where you could program the AI to pilot your bot for you and given the limited control space on a PSP it was something I tried immediatly and it was honestly kind of more fun that way. You felt like an engineer designing your robot and not only were you tinkering with the parts but also working to make the AI use the design to your vision and intent. Watching the cinematic camera dance around to catch the action as your bot battles and having the nail biting thrill of seeing if your combination of AI programming and mech design won out and finally getting more prize money for that next upgrade and then having to sit down and tinker with it again was just amazing.
Great video and glad to see a more real world version of robot battles is still so popular!
my friend had this game when we were kids, and I remember one of his older brothers made a bot that was essentially an unpowered cube with no controls that was so mashed full of pistons that it would slowly shake for like 20 seconds until the physics engine just breaks and it flies around the arena tearing itself apart and possibly destroying whatever it touched, the pistons would look like they were flying out of it and orbiting around the box despite never actually being outside of it. it would do that for a solid like, minute or so, until the bot took enough damage from its high speed flight that parts broke and the glitch settled down, leaving it stuck in place and inevitably deemed immobilized. watching that cube explode around the arena and hoping it touches one of the enemies is definitely a core childhood memory of mine. they called that bot WonderBox and both me and my friend never could quite replicate it, we've had other bots do similar things, but nothing compares to the extremes of the original, and "WonderBox-ing" became the term we'd use to describe whenever a game's physics engine would break or objects clipping into other objects began violently shaking around.
I think the original files for the WonderBox was lost at some point when they updated the operating system on that PC (there was a reason we were trying to replicate it, but it may have been because we wanted to have two WonderBoxs fight each other), but there is a chance it may still be buried in those files somewhere.
Love this review! I like seeing non nft reviews from you :D And this game struck nostalgia, haha!
Glad your growing from your nft roots. Old fun games sound nice
YOU BROUGHT BACK THE OLD INTRO! Love your content and the insane growth your channel has seen, keep it up! :)
I loved this game. My brother and i played it all the damn time. Seems like just yesterday and now im 32 years old!
As someone who was big and still somewhat apart of the RA2 community, I love this game finally getting love!
I love this video, I know you normally do NFT stuff but THIS Is quality. Thanks my man.
Holy hell I completely forgot about this game and the amount of nostalgia wave slamming me is insane!
Specifically the texture deformations with the numbers floating trigger it the most.
omg and the drop-n-drop music files into the game.
Holy heck, this game and Roboforge got me into being an engineering dork. I LOVED the entire genre of "make robots to smash into each other but like be smart about it."
Oh cool, I played the demo of Roboforge -- always wanted to get back into it, but never figured out how to get the free version that's being distributed now working under Wine, and I don't have any Windows machines any more.
@@05Matz
If I remember correctly Roboforge basically runs entirely in Java, So that may help narrow down the compatibility. I think also if you can get a linux environment that is happy to run a lot of XP era games it should truck along just fine.
The altervista site for the game should be the most up to date.
ALSO, the game had these cheat codes that let you attach stuff like a hover-craft engine and a freaking cannon (among other things but I forget all the stuff that gets added). Of course it wasn't allowed in multiplayer, but it was ridiculously fun to use and absolutely broken as hell.
I miss the days when game devs put cheats into their games like that.
I discovered your channel through the algorithm feeding me the nft videos but im subscribing because of these retrospectives sprinkled in. Congrats on blowing up over the last year. The way you flow talking about either sibjects is very enthralling.
thank you jauwn for battling these bots
you are very welcome
Most nights it was either this or RCT2. Thanks for dredging up some good memories
RCT2 was great, I played that a ton as well. RCT3 came out just a year after RA2 but I didn't really like it as much as the 2nd and 1st games in the series; quite a bit changed. It had a nice charm to it though, and some of the custom rides people have made are pretty impressive.
Oh shit, I remember playing this as a kid in typing classes, since absolutely no one involved gave a damn about keeping things on-track, especially not the teachers. I still ended up learning how to type super-fast, but not from that class or the method they were trying to teach (my go-to now is a "raptor claw" type thing with only index/middle fingers and thumbs). All that class taught me was combat robots are sick as hell, and I have zero regrets.
Thanks for reminding me what this game is called, Jauwn, gonna see about picking this up again.
How did robot arena 2 get inside the school computer?
@@icantthinkofagoodusername5564 Not sure, this wasn't a regular elementary school though if I recall right, it was one of those community class things where you sign up and go there of your own volition.
If I were to guess, I'd assume it was either a kid bringing in the stuff to install it via physical media, or the internet there not being restricted because the people running the place didn't know jack about IT, as was and still is often the case.
2:52 ohhh yea that nostalgia feel..
I can almost feel my little sister breathing down my neck wanting to see more robo carnage!
When I saw the video name, I was excited to see someone review Robot Wars, a game I played obsessively when I was 6 years old. I was REALLY disappointed to see it was some other game I'd never heard of, so the twist reveal halfway through the video had me literally cheering at my screen. Thank you, Jauwn!
Love watching you review a game that isn't just a scam! Can almost hear the change in your voice when you talk about this versus all the nft games!
Im glad Im not the only person that got deeply relieved at the reveal in the second half. I knew I wasn't crazy.
Old school Battle Bots is a certified hood classic.
98k subscribers!! It is, what, less than six months ago you were at 3K and I was so excited to see you go up to 4k!!!!!! Now you’re at 98k?!?!?! Holy smokes, you are crushing it!!! So so so impressed and you definitely earned them and more!!!
🎉 yeah the growth this year has been tremendous! It's also great to see so many of the same commenters all these months later, including yourself. It's a great feeling to know the OGs are still around!
@@jauwn we’re not going anywhere :) glad to have been here to see the magic 🪄
Just discovered your channel yesterday and have been binging your videos ever since! You've earned yourself a subscriber and I hope u reach that 100k mark!
I have always loved battlebots, great video!
The combo of the UI, the visuals, the physics etc reminds me of SO many old pc games I obsessed over as a kid. These things just have a *vibe* to them.
YES! Another obscure video game deep dive from Jauwn! I’ve been scratching at my neck, jonesing for my next hit ever since Diggles!
As someone that spent a good chunk of my early internet life going balls deep into the stock and DSL metagame it still holds a place in my heart despite no longer playing it once everyone started to focus on the IRL format that I'm partially responsible for
If you get the chance, look at the some of the more extreme stock designs, there is a legitimate beauty in their intricate chaos
This just got me hyped for the next season of Battle Bots. What a beautifully simple premise, the spectacle of blood sports without the moral qualms of things actually dying needlessly
I know that the NFT takedowns are the bread and butter of the channel but damn these cdlebrations of creativity are my favorites.
Once you've spent enough time in the mud, you learn to appreciate a clean experience even more
@@jauwn Hah, a comic i used to read had a character who loved terrible coffee more than good coffee because a terrible cup evokes memories of everything better but the good one is just there by itself.
No way, really? I’m legitimately the same way - I love terrible coffee because it brings back memories of when I worked a shitty office job and lived off of the terrible coffee
@@jauwn Hah it was a prequel book to the D&D based webcomic Order of the Stick...though admittedly the main villain was the bad coffee enjoyer. The ability to find the good in the bad has always resonated with me even if I am not great at it myself.
One of my favorite games still chasing the high of the building and fighting systems
Dude you have no clue how long I've had this game in the back of my mind since i was young. Could not for the life of me remember the title
I absolutely loved this game when younger...thank you for covering it
I had a technology class in middle school and one of the stations was just playing this game, best class ever.
YESSSS
I LOVED Battlebots as a kid and had TONS of fun on RA2!!
The DSL and BBEANS and idk community are really cool but they've been at it for so long that all their builds are hyper-optimized 😅
I am going to be checking RR2 ASAP, thanks for the rec Jauwn! ❤
Finally, more Jauwn content!
New Year, New Content!
I need more jauwndice!
Perfect example of how fun game mechanics are far more important than flashy graphics. I wish I knew about this game back then, I would have played the hell out of it _and_ used the sound effects as audio for my PC system notifications. 😉
I miss those good old days of drag & drop audio files, both into & out of games... with games like this I'd often throw a few extra music tracks in so I didn't get sick of the in-game soundtrack playing on repeat for hours at a time. Nothing worse than ruining a kick-arse soundtrack by listening to it so much that it loses all meaning.
Totally! The ability to easily modify the files is so so fun and something missing from many modern games.
Aww man. I used to rent these two games from our library in the early 00's. Robot Arena 1's "military" opponent scared me (and my brother, who played coop with me at the time) because they insinuated that he normally uses explosives and miniguns in his bots but didn't for our fight. I miss these kind of games especially for what they did with the hardware at the time. Seriously watching these had me going through a nostalgia memory dump of moments I had forgotten from over two decades ago.
Would love to hear more about the TCs for this game! As a kid I adored Robot Wars and even though the game was mid I still put a ton of time into it. The madcap creations in the robot battling genre really set the stage for me to start making weird gizmos and gadgets in 3d modeling!
i still remember playing this game in 2003 with my dad cuz he loved robot wars. good times
edit thanks for also showing some of RA1 i had almost completely forgotten RA1 that was probably the first video game my eyes ever saw. my dad liked playing that game and would be holding me while playing it sometimes. i still remember that cover art picture. wild. thanks for the nostalgia trip
I would have never guessed you were a crypto channel! This is where it's at though. I could watch you do these all day.
Well not really a crypto channel. An anti-crypto channel
I hope in 2029, Jawn drops a "metaverse" thats just Lyra but with no way to deal damage to one another.
我爱ＣＲＹＰＴＯＣＵＲＲＥＮＣＹ
You just awoke a memory in me. I had this game!
Watching your video more, it was actually the first Robot Arena game that I had. I remember the chassis having slots and just putting battering rams to smash into the other guys. I remember enjoying it as a kid, but it's probably because it was the only PC game I had at the time.
I think I remember making a metal shoebox with long axes off the long sides and high power wheels on the short sides. I set up a command to let it turn in place, and I'd just dervish, and anything that got close enough would get pummeled.
Robot Arena 1 is what I remember in my childhood. It was basically a solved game with pneumatic spikes on the front being the best DPS meta. It ran at about 10 frames per second on my uncle's backup computer. Explosions would drop that down to 4.
worthy of note is Robot Combat might be a bit off the mainstream, Battlebots is still going to this day on TV and NHRL is free to watch on RUclips consisting of smaller, but just as competetive weighclasses
As much as I love your NFT game content, seeing you branch out like this is so cool.
I must say, I've really been enjoying these retro reviews you've been pushing out! Unlike a lot of game reviewers who don't really review the games they're talking about and just make vague criticisms and jokes, you're quite thorough with what your reviews on the games in an entertaining and engaging way.
I can't wait to see what you have next in this series!
And, if it isn't too much of an ask, do you take suggestions?
Hit me with suggestions!
I played this game. It was fun pretending to design BattleBots.
There is a damage bug with the spike weapons, that allows you to quickly destroy your opponents if you ram into them at a slight angle and keep driving into them.
I can't believe I've never heard of this. Really, far ahead of its time given the popularity of physics-based sandbox building games.
How... Have i never heard of this masterpiece?
Hidden memory unlocked, thanks, downloading it!
Fun fact you can actually cheese the 30-minute timer by backing out of the tournament and then going back in. It will reset to 30 minutes but remember your fixes. So you can easily get back up to full health
I LOVE when games have flavor text for things.
What I love about Robot Arena 2 is how much this game is a glitchy, unfinished mess where you can create some pretty impressive designs if you know what you are doing or listen to the community. Some glitches I remember:
* The 7kg razor tip is more powerful than the 30kg sledgehammer due to how damage values work.
* Want to stack Batteries? Just get a pixel-perfect position over the first one and save space
* Don't select your armour type when creating a bot, and you'll have a machine with the strongest armour in the game. This is referred as Double Strength Aluminium by the community
* All motors consume the same amount of power, so stick on those Powered Z-Teks without any worries.
* Want lower wedges? Just use a servo and adjust the position. Don't power it for the best results
I played the shit out of this as a kid, loved it so much! The building system was genuinely great, especially for the time.
Great review for a great game! I got it during the summer when I was 9 or 10, and, around the same time, I broke my wrist and had to wear a cast for a month, so playing it was pretty much all I did that month. Still have the disc. I didn't know the game had a modding community; it might be time to bust it back out...
I am surprised & outraged that 'Robot Wars' never contacted the Developer of 'Robot Arena 2' to make a Higher Budget Update of this Game
Imagine what we could have...
We could have Actually Circular Robots!
XD
I spent so many hours as a kid making goofy robots in Robot Arena 2. Loved the freeform design they introduced with that one, and I basically stuffed my hard drive with mods once little me learned how. RIP Lu Tze.
great vid thanks for posting, retro games were just so damn fun
It's always a great day when this man uploads
I'm JUST NOW HEARING ABOUT THIS?!
I'm gonna have to try this out, this looks REALLY fun
Love this game. Spent a lot of time with it as a kid. I always started with Walrus and just put a ton of ice picks on the front rammer. I could easily beat everything except Grizzly (that bot was always OP in my opinion). Really enjoyed playing their "career mode" because there was a glitch where if you closed the game in the between match repair screen you could reset the repair clock but keep all the repairs you made, so it was possible to always be completely repaired between rounds. Also I remember if you made a very light robot with a very powerful drivetrain you could actually drive up the wall and around the ceiling because the physics engine was a bit janky.
EDIT: speaking of robot combat games, does anyone remember Roboforge? It was like this game except you had to program an AI for your bot. I tried to play it but could never figure it out. Seems like the kind of thing that people who are smarter than me would have a ton of fun with.
Why do i feel nostalgic for a game i didnt knew exists?
I never knew this game existed! Thanks for telling me about this game dude!
It's nice to hear you talk about actually good games, hope you'll make more non-nft content in the future too. But, yknow, also hoping for more nft scum highlights)
I won a tournament in this game in a middle school engineering class. My design was a big titanium box covered in spikes. people would try and hit me and they'd end up spiking themselves and giving me tons of points
This game was incredible. I can't comprehend why no other game has made the building part of a robot building game so well.
As someone who owned all the robot wars games... and this one... so many memories.
This oddly reminds me of the game "The Movies"; another game that did something awesome 20 years aho, and has never really been remade
Yeah that game was crazy too. I might review it in the future but it’s a bit less obscure
I loved playing this game as a child!
Bot Arena 3 was a lovely classic in the same vein. Loved it to bits
8:57 free form body shape?! For that era of games that is quite impressive