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)
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?
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!*
"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 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 :)
"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.
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!
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. 👍
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.
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.
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.
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 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%)
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.
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).
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!
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.
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.
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.
Awesome video as usual! Really informative and super interesting! You're quickly shooting up to be one of my favorite RUclips channels! Keep it up Kim!
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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
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.
@@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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
Ahh the 90s! Back when "fighting game" wasn't a solid definition, and every combat game was called a beat 'em up regardless if it was the one-on-one or scrolling variety.
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.
thing with this is the makers must have surely known it was awful way before release with very obvious wrong things such as the inability to jump over an opponent, things every other beat em up did, problems that were not technically hard to overcome. it boggles the mind.
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.
Haha "For plot reasons, you can only play as the blue cyborg." If they had let you play as the other robots or jump over your opponent, they would have had to have rendered every robot facing in the opposite direction, too, so the game would have been on 26 disks :O They couldn't have just reversed the graphics in software without reversing the light source, too.
Some magazines survived and I bought those: namely PC Zone and PC Format. But yes, the Amiga magazine market was saturated at that time - so many, and I bought almost all of them every month! Madness!
When you come to think of it, you can see a clear pattern in what happened to the British developers that made such brilliant games in the 80's and first half of the 90's: US publishers got involved and ruined it by waving around money. It only goes to show that money corrupts - even when it involves people that worked with passion at first.
The expectations for this game were huge. Two other titles spring to mind. Daikatana and The Order 1886. It is a fair comment that nobody sets out to make a bad game.From your excellent video it seems like the small Rise development team were made to cover too many formats.
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.
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 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.
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?
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?
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!*
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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 of the Wobots started the hype back in nineteen nindy-twee"
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.
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%.
"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?
These aren't reviews, they are little gaming history lessons. Great!
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!
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..
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.
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
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
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.
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.
17:10 - Is that Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” in the background? Nice touch!
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.
The second half of the video about games journalism was the best.
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 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%)
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.
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.
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!
The narrator sounds like a Elmer Fudd's British if somewhat camp sounding cousin. *jokes*. Top quality videos though Kim. Subscribed! :-)
And yet OMF 2097 was what everyone ended up playing, at least on PC.
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.
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.
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.
Awesome video as usual! Really informative and super interesting! You're quickly shooting up to be one of my favorite RUclips channels! Keep it up Kim!
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!
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 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.
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
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.
Loving your work Kim. Very interesting, brilliantly researched and put together. Thank you.
"The useful thing about researching rise of the robots.....oh my god" That was so funny the way you cut that bit together. Genius.
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.
I remember Brian May talking about his 'contribution' on a Movies Games & Videos feature. He could not have looked more disinterested.
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.
is that 3D Studio 4? Dos version lol....even before 3d studio MAX
I love the use of Kraftwerk songs on this video, very fitting.
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.
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 remember seeing ads in magazines and playing it on my SNES. Eh. Meh.
The main blue robot look like Pepsiman lmao
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!
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.
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
Kim wins again! Once i heard Kraftwerk “we are the robots” i thought my iPod was on but it was your video 👏🏽🙌🏾👏🏽🙌🏾
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.
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.
Great comments about Edge magazine. Never has one publication done so much to make games seem so dull and tiresome.
Today marks the 25th anniversary of this game.
I remember having a pirated copy of this with loads of disks...a totally broken game, shower of shite!
"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.
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.
You are so good at what you do I don't understand how you don't own the genre and rule RUclips.
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.
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.
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 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.
I come to this video for comfort Kim- you do such damn good work
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.
I'm still waiting for Brian May Soundtrack, since 1994. Those chords could be done by any guitar beginner with 1 week of experience.
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.
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?
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
1:30 Aw bless you honey. I’m a fan of anyone who can poke fun of themselves...and who also references Python.
Ahh the 90s! Back when "fighting game" wasn't a solid definition, and every combat game was called a beat 'em up regardless if it was the one-on-one or scrolling variety.
Your videos are fantastic, you go right into the details, a real labour of love
13 disks. 13. That is INSANE. Also, this is a great video as always!
Amiga Power was a great mag, used to look forward to it every month. Great video as always mate.
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.
thing with this is the makers must have surely known it was awful way before release with very obvious wrong things such as the inability to jump over an opponent, things every other beat em up did, problems that were not technically hard to overcome. it boggles the mind.
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.
Haha "For plot reasons, you can only play as the blue cyborg." If they had let you play as the other robots or jump over your opponent, they would have had to have rendered every robot facing in the opposite direction, too, so the game would have been on 26 disks :O They couldn't have just reversed the graphics in software without reversing the light source, too.
Can't believe you have dislikes on your vids man.. These are awesome and glad found channel. Keep up great work👍
Some magazines survived and I bought those: namely PC Zone and PC Format. But yes, the Amiga magazine market was saturated at that time - so many, and I bought almost all of them every month! Madness!
You know, there is one thing nice I can say about Rise of the Robots. It works really well for background ambience if you put a longplay on.
I've never heard of you till today, but this was an interesting and well researched video. I like it.
When you come to think of it, you can see a clear pattern in what happened to the British developers that made such brilliant games in the 80's and first half of the 90's: US publishers got involved and ruined it by waving around money. It only goes to show that money corrupts - even when it involves people that worked with passion at first.
I remember opening the box in excitement only to see a dozen floppy discs, thankfully shops would accept game returns back then.
The expectations for this game were huge. Two other titles spring to mind. Daikatana and The Order 1886. It is a fair comment that nobody sets out to make a bad game.From your excellent video it seems like the small Rise development team were made to cover too many formats.
Hello,
Where can we find magazine scans of the 3D model renders/illustrations? The ones that are not in-game.
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.
17:03 to see Rise of the Robots giving you the middle finger
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 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.
Wise of the Wobots, Sean Connery's favourite game!