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 Alternate title: Crapheap Challenge. So the recent news that the BBC is bringing back Robot Wars for a new series got me digging up and watching through the old episodes on Youtube, reveling in watching barely functioning amateur engineering projects smash into each other like I was 12 years old again. This, in turn, got me to dig out my old Robot Wars PC game from amongst the ever expanding piles of books and old video games that is my living space and now here we are. Specifically what we're playing is this: Which came out in 2001 around the time of the fourth series of Robot Wars. There is also a sequel "Robot Wars: Extreme Destruction" which I didn't know existed until doing research for this LP and I have since procured a copy of. If all goes well we'll be playing that too once Arenas is finished. I'd like to preface before we begin that Arenas of Destruction is a 15 year old PC game. It has no windowed mode and took a lot of fiddling and messing around with old patches dredged up from the depths of the internet to even get it running. It's been difficult to record, has recurring audio issues and crashes fairly regularly. It's a game all about building your own little combat robot by gluing together some configuration of pre-made parts and then smashing it into other robots. A few of the favourite contestants from the show make appearances as expensive unlockables and the ever popular House Robots patrol around the various arenas as extremely dangerous mobile hazards (Or optional boss fights depending on how you want to look at it.) Although I absolutely adored it as a wee lad it's not really a very good game. The selection of parts and what you can do with them is frustratingly limited and there's only eight different arenas you can battle in, the last of which doesn't unlock until you beat the game. That said it's still a game about strapping a chainsaw to a lawnmower you found in the scrapheap and driving it around against other people who've done the same thing. Let the Wars begin!         This has been an LP fraught with recording difficulties and more than a little incompetence on my part. Although I think they're amusing enough to be worth keeping around for folks who are interested, the early episodes are in a really weird and messed up resolution because it was the only way I could get it working at the time and the audio levels in the first recording session (Episodes 1-3) are completely hosed. If you don't want to be bothered with any of that skip ahead to the updates below where I finally manage to get my poo poo together and have the game and OBS co-operate.  with: Jamie The D and Manic_Misanthrope.  with: Jamie and Manic.  with: Manic and Mini Librarian.  with: Manic and Mini Librarian.  with: Manic and Mini Librarian.  with: Jamie, Manic and TheMcD  with: Manic and McD  with: Manic and McD  with: Manic and McD  with: Manic and McD  with: Jamie, Manic and McD  with: Manic and McD  with: Manic and McD  with: Manic and McD  with: Manic and McD  with: Manic and McD  with: Manic and McD  with: Mini Librarian, Manic and McD. Technical issues resulted in very quiet audio for this episode. You'll have to turn your volume up. Super sorry.  with: Mini Librarian, Manic and McD. Still got the super quiet audio but given how angry I get in this one that's probably not a bad thing. Captain Fargle fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Apr 17, 2016 |
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Feb 11, 2016 14:16
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SPECIAL BONUS TIME: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek7mXOPtJeM Captain Fargle fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Mar 23, 2016 |
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Feb 11, 2016 14:33
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I'd like to see a Hypnodisc-style flywheel demonstrated, those were always fun.
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Feb 11, 2016 14:37
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You should try to build something like the Mythbusters' old robot that flung other robots so high and so hard that the event organizers gave them a prize after their first match and said "hey, your robot is cool and could probably win but we're afraid that you are going to toss another robot into the audience and hurt someone."
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Feb 11, 2016 16:49
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Jolyne Cujoh posted:You should try to build something like the Mythbusters' old robot that flung other robots so high and so hard that the event organizers gave them a prize after their first match and said "hey, your robot is cool and could probably win but we're afraid that you are going to toss another robot into the audience and hurt someone." The closest thing to that is already in the game and it's called Chaos 2.
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Feb 11, 2016 17:20
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Please stop playing that garbage robot and just put Diotoir in instead. Thank you.
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Feb 11, 2016 20:15
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MooCowlian posted:Please stop playing that garbage robot and just put Diotoir in instead. Thank you. Diotoir requires us to keep playing through the game to a: unlock him for purchase and b: be able to afford his furry rear end.
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Feb 11, 2016 20:16
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That's hosed up. Beauty should not have a price.
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Feb 11, 2016 20:21
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I watched a lot of Battlebots as a kid, so I still have fond memories of watching robots beat the crap out of each other, and this scratches the same itch (with the bonus of terrible gameplay thrown in). Never saw Robot Wars, but you guys do a good job of explaining the important stuff for people who haven't seen it. You also explain the game mechanics well, and the four of you have solid chemistry together. The game is already hilarious. Looking forward to the rest of the LP!
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Feb 12, 2016 01:25
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 With Crapocalypse living up to his name Manic, Jamie and I bring a new contender to the field. Captain Fargle fucked around with this message at 12:39 on Feb 12, 2016 |
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Feb 12, 2016 12:29
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Okay, now that we're doing the building work off screen I can explain how we're making the paltry 3000 robobux stretch so far and give brief summaries of the insults to engineering we made so far. The Scrapyard randomizes both it's inventory and price list every time we go in it from the build-a-bot menu, this means we can grab some things on the cheap to fit with the robot at the expense of the stuff needing severe repairs after the first round every god drat time. It also has two unique sets of armour: Step plate aluminium and Salvaged Steel. These both act as the go between for Aluminium and Steel, Step plate is better than basic aluminium, Salvage steel is worse than regular steel. It also has a few unique power sources: mostly engines from motorcycles and go karts and has it's own set of Extras such as the TV Ariel and the Traffic Cone. There's no reason to really get any non-scrapyard extras. They're cheaper and you've got the potential to get some rare stuff and as extras don't get repaired, they don't have a downside for the repeat cost. Also, selling a robot gives you a complete refund for all of the parts on it, so you never run into the death spiral of selling off crap parts in a desperate bid to improve your bot only to face dwindling funds. It also means there's rarely any reason to have more than one robot on your roster, at least when starting out. As you get later in the game and can really afford the good stuff like flywheels and crushing claws it might be worth it for convenience sake to have multiple, several tournaments have special restrictions as to what is and isn't allowed and if we ever get out of London we will show you. Anyway the bots. Crapheap/Crapocalypse/Crapocalypse 2 (now with more flags) Chassis: Basic Wedge Power Source: 12V battery Mobility: 4 wheel drive electric motors Weapons: Spring loaded Pickaxe and a rear Spike Trap array Armour: Aluminium step plate Strengths: Is a wedge, has pointy things. Weaknesses: Control set ups, frailty. Control scheme shenanigans aside this thing is a hunk of junk. Improved from the 2 wheel drive starter Robot with the wood paneling, but this thing can't do anything well enough to compensate for it's various flaws. Both its weapons are middling, it has no way of self righting and the step plate gets shredded in the 3 way when anyone looks at it funny. All in all, a bit of a pissup. Rambo Chassis: Box Wedge Power Source: 24V Battery Mobility: 6 wheel drive electric motors Weapons: Small electric lifting forks Armour: Aluminium Step Plate Strengths: Speed and pushing power, low ground clearance allows it to get under most robots Weaknesses: Frail, lack of a way to keep opponents in place. A much better attempt. With 90 pushing power this thing can shove with the best of them and its top speed vastly outclasses other robots in it's field allowing it to dart in and get underneath nearly every robot we've faced thus far. We were lucky enough with the Scrapyard to get the bits for this bot and it served itself well, managing to beat two robots 1 on 1 before it's armour started to become a liability vs the pneumatic pick axe that our last opponent had. Unfortunately, due to a lack of budget, we couldn't add anything that would either help with flipping enemies we got under, or keeping them in place for pit dumping. Crapheap's rear spike trap might have come in handy if we hadn't flogged it.
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Feb 12, 2016 16:41
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Really enjoying this so far. Hopefully Rambo 2.0 can finally beat the first tournament. Not to completely derail this but it looks like the other early 2000s janky wedgebot simulator Robot Arena is getting another sequel after 13 years. People still play Robot Arena 2 competitively, buggy Havok physics implementation and all.
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Feb 12, 2016 19:08
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Well, now you've got me playing this game too. It was quite embarrassing to be spending ages in the robot creator wondering why my robot wasn't eligible to start in the event, and it turns out that I was trying to use a drive that needed a petrol engine with an electric battery. Whoops. I had a couple attempts at the Assault tournament (figuring it to be the easier one because of the lower payout), switching out parts to try different things (including one embarrassing moment where I was attempting to flee from an opponent and drove over the pit just as it opened, pitting us both but awarding the match to my opponent because he fell second), and it looks like I've found a bit of a winner, because I managed to get through the tournament. Presenting Wotan I: Just a big chunk of metal with a big flipper. Goes fast, but can't turn for poo poo. It's kind of a problem when there's only one opponent left because I can't get a good ramming speed in to then slam them into the wall and use that to flip them, but when there's multiple around, it seems to do real well. Also, the announcer coding is just a god drat marvel. It really can't shut the gently caress up, it's incredible. Looking forward to more of the LP.
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Feb 12, 2016 21:14
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What's your recording/encoding setup that your output video is only taking up a fraction of the screen, Fargle? Or are you avoiding cropping because the video looks awful stretched to fit, even using PointResize?
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Feb 12, 2016 22:37
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Also your levels are pretty goofy. I can barely hear the game or your co-commentators.
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Feb 13, 2016 05:44
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ElTipejoLoco posted:What's your recording/encoding setup that your output video is only taking up a fraction of the screen, Fargle? Or are you avoiding cropping because the video looks awful stretched to fit, even using PointResize? I'm recording the game and commentary using OBS and I know gently caress all about video editing tbh. This is just how things turned out due to the game being really old and loving my resolution up. It's direct game capture too which I thought would fix it but nope.  EDIT: Youtube keeps suggesting some kind of autocrappoing/resizing when I upload them but it really fucks with the quality so I don't want to do it. Teledahn posted:Also your levels are pretty goofy. I can barely hear the game or your co-commentators. It's my first time making a VLP and I screwed up the audio balance in the first recording session. It's fixed after Episode 3. Captain Fargle fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Feb 13, 2016 |
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Feb 13, 2016 06:14
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Captain Fargle posted:I'm recording the game and commentary using OBS and I know gently caress all about video editing tbh. This is just how things turned out due to the game being really old and loving my resolution up. It's direct game capture too which I thought would fix it but nope. :( For OBS you should be able to specify that it crop any kind of source automatically, but you'd need to know by how many pixels the input's off. Game source is just a hook that tries to detect the game's renderer/.dll and can sometimes result in a tiny source on old games, but maybe the problem is simpler and you just didn't click Edit Scene in OBS and stretch the edges to fit the preview window? You might also wanna consider running the game in a Windows XP Virtual Machine if it's downgrading your resolution? OBS should still be able to capture it fine regardless, though, but maybe you can have an easier time window capturing the VM instead. Give either the Tech Support Fort thread or the wiki a visit just in case, though, either might help you improve the videos in the future. It's not really a super problem but I figure you might prefer it if the videos were larger and stuff.
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Feb 13, 2016 16:02
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ElTipejoLoco posted:Yeah, don't let YouTube do anything it offers to do on your behalf unless you want to laugh at the results. I hadn't considered a virtual machine. I'll probably play around with that at some point and see how it works out.
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Feb 13, 2016 17:21
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 The last of our dodgy audio updates. After a game crash Manic and I experience a happy accident.
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Feb 13, 2016 17:34
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Oh god, that first match was pretty much a combination of my greatest hits in pit shenanigans. First being on the pit when it lowered and then fiddling around trying to get the opponent into it and driving into it myself, with the opponent following along just after it, but being eliminated first. And yeah, the house robots are kind of goofy. Sometimes, they will just turn on the "gently caress this guy in particular" mode, will move at like triple the normal speed, and just not give a gently caress about the patrol zones anymore. It seems like sometimes it accidentially triggers the "house robots gang up on immobilized robot" mode for a robot that's still active, and then that guy is just hosed. I've had Bash just chase me around the arena at lightning speed before, it sucks. EDIT: Also, gently caress Pussycat. TheMcD fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Feb 13, 2016 |
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Feb 13, 2016 20:49
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Just trying to get a handle on exactly how this game works. You just beat the Assault tournament, earning you an extra 1000 funbucks, and the Assault Trophy. Am I wrong in assuming that this just means that you now have a total of 1000 extra funbucks tacked on top of the 2000 you started with, and each tournament you win just increases your available money pool for 'bot customization? The follow-up question to which is: when we sell back parts, we are selling back at a 1:1 rate, right? You can't completely gently caress yourself out of your budget, right? The next 'bot you make with a pneumatic drill needs to be called Mr RightNow.
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Feb 13, 2016 22:09
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RickVoid posted:Just trying to get a handle on exactly how this game works. You just beat the Assault tournament, earning you an extra 1000 funbucks, and the Assault Trophy. Am I wrong in assuming that this just means that you now have a total of 1000 extra funbucks tacked on top of the 2000 you started with, and each tournament you win just increases your available money pool for 'bot customization? The follow-up question to which is: when we sell back parts, we are selling back at a 1:1 rate, right? You can't completely gently caress yourself out of your budget, right? Yeah, that's how it works. However, there are also tournaments which have entry fees, so you can lose cash, but you'll always have the money that went into your robot.
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Feb 13, 2016 22:12
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TheMcD posted:Yeah, that's how it works. However, there are also tournaments which have entry fees, so you can lose cash, but you'll always have the money that went into your robot. Huh, okay. I was going to ask about the "Entry Fees", and if those were actually just gates showing that "Yes, I beat the previous tournaments and have this much cash available to spend on my 'bot". Can you replay earlier tournaments to earn more cash?
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Feb 13, 2016 22:15
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RickVoid posted:Huh, okay. I was going to ask about the "Entry Fees", and if those were actually just gates showing that "Yes, I beat the previous tournaments and have this much cash available to spend on my 'bot". Can you replay earlier tournaments to earn more cash? Yeah, you can, and you very probably will. The way things roughly work is like this: - Play tournaments to win money. - Use money to upgrade your bot. - Use money to enter tournaments. - Have money to unlock new areas to enter tournaments in. - Win more tournaments. So right now, a goal for Team Accident is to beat the Robot Wars Tournament, then gather 3000 bucks in the bank, which unlocks the North Sea arena with three more tournaments. Each tournament there has an entry fee of 500, so if you lose enough there, you have to go back to the London tournaments to get the money to unlock the North Sea tournaments again.
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Feb 13, 2016 22:24
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RickVoid posted:Huh, okay. I was going to ask about the "Entry Fees", and if those were actually just gates showing that "Yes, I beat the previous tournaments and have this much cash available to spend on my 'bot". Can you replay earlier tournaments to earn more cash? Yup. You need a certain cash threshold to unlock later arenas but once they're open they stay open provided you can afford the entry fees for the tournaments there. The locations are considered actually considered separate from the tournaments held there in terms of unlocks.
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Feb 13, 2016 23:16
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Speaking of our Reigning Assault Tournament champion.... The Accident Chassis: Flat Disk Power source: 2 Stroke scrapped Scooter engine Mobility: 4 wheel drive medium differential Petrol motors Armour: Kevlar. (Who throws away Kevlar? Seriously?) Weapons: A pneumatic drill and twin spike set up at the front, lawnmower blade at the back. Strengths: Wide array of weaponry from multiple angles, fairly resilient. Weakness: Our worst handling robot to date. Weapons snap off easilly Ho boy, this was our first champion. This thing. This... mismatch of parts and equipment. This is the start to all our success. God loving dammit. The Accident was us instead of doing the rational thing of maybe putting better armour on Rambo, or switching the lifting forks for a flipper since our low ground clearance was enough to get under most things without the lifting spikes, we scrapped the whole bot and started fresh on one of the dumbest robots to date. The twin spikes push people away from the drill, the lawnmower blade will snap off. The drive set up makes it really hard to control, even for this game when the engine starts off damaged due to salvage parts sucking. Yet it won. Part of this is due to RNG. Cutthroat is our major bug bear in the early game as its front Carbon Blade Cutting Disk is one of the stronger simple weapons you can get, and it has it front and center. Other robots have it as well but their usually in the back, and the AI doesn't like to use rear facing weapons much, preferring to use them as a last resort to someone trying to rear-end them making it a much less deadly threat. The other is that a 6 way free-for-all is actually somewhat easier. The AI's not malicious enough to all gang up on the player 5 on 1, and as such will usually fight it out among themselves, allowing the Accident to mainly stay out of major trouble and only go in when there's only 2 other participants left, all having sustained damage making it easy pickings even with our hodge-podge of weaponry.
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Feb 13, 2016 23:31
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Manic_Misanthrope posted:Speaking of our Reigning Assault Tournament champion.... "Throwing poo poo at the wall to see what sticks"
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Feb 13, 2016 23:50
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As a longtime fan of Robot Wars I shall be following this. I didn't play any actual Robot Wars games but I did try out Robot Arena 2 with that big mod, whatever it was called. It had some interesting physics going on at times.
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Feb 14, 2016 00:42
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This is really fun so far (though I am looking forward to the nicer audio/video quality!) I was a diehard Robot Wars fan for about five or six years, but being a preteen for most of that time I was never particularly familiar with any of the humans involved apart from the presenters. You mentioned match-fixing, and I was wondering where the best places were for behind-the-scenes Robot Wars gossip, because that sounds amazing.
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Feb 14, 2016 14:02
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Gertrude Perkins posted:This is really fun so far (though I am looking forward to the nicer audio/video quality!) I was a diehard Robot Wars fan for about five or six years, but being a preteen for most of that time I was never particularly familiar with any of the humans involved apart from the presenters. You mentioned match-fixing, and I was wondering where the best places were for behind-the-scenes Robot Wars gossip, because that sounds amazing. Just type "Controversy" into Robot Wars Wiki. That'll get you pretty much everything. There were quite a few instances over the course of the show's run.
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Feb 14, 2016 21:13
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 with Manic. As promised in the vid here's Plunderbird shenanigans: https://youtu.be/9XnfENigRi8?list=PL2DACD519E9B8FD66&t=543 https://youtu.be/3ik-rJttfK4?list=PL2DACD519E9B8FD66&t=39 This is their appearance in entry Series 4 so the one most concurrent to the LP. They are the best. 
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Feb 15, 2016 19:51
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Looks like we have some match fixing going on this episode 
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Feb 15, 2016 20:17
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I love how you keep moving your bot into every source of fire you can.
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Feb 15, 2016 20:23
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Yeah, like, the tournaments aren't bugged, they're designed that way. First you have the three-way, then the two "winners" of the three-way go up against each other. It's wrong, but it's designed that way. And the Robot Wars Championship is a really questionable choice of early-game tournament. I guess the World Championship is the tournament you want to win if you want to be on the level of your Chaos 2s, your Panic Attacks and so on. Dead Metal is on the second tournament map, by the way - the oil rig. The house robots are set up based on map and number of robots, it seems, so for the Robot Wars set, we have Bash/Matilda/Killalot/Shunt, whereas for the oil rig map, we have Shunt/Dead Metal/Bash. And you will not disparage the name of Psychosprout.  That thing was awesome in its stupidity, just like Jim Struts, the robot that won by doing nothing.
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Feb 15, 2016 21:37
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Ultimate true story: This is the game where I got my username from. I have no idea why this got a sequel.
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Feb 15, 2016 23:41
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Well looks like someone got an update~ The Accident V2 Chassis: Flat Disk Power source: 2 Stroke scrapped Scooter engine Mobility: 4 wheel drive medium differential Petrol motors and a single caster Armour: Kevlar Weapons: A pneumatic drill and twin lifting forks at the font, spike trap and 3 15cm titanium ramming spike out back Strengths: Lot of weapons, acting as damaging items and ablative armour. Weakness: Handling's a pile of poo poo, the drill pushes people off and away from the lifting forks. The Accident in principle might have changed but the practice is still the same, we are at the mercy of the AI and the RNG match making. This time with the House Robots deciding they want to be nice to us after many failed attempts. Originally the front lifting forks were replaced by the larger model, but it was too unwieldy on the small chassis and didn't get under people as well as the small ones did. Also, our Kevlar armor is strong against swinging weapons weak to spinning weapons so Cutthroat has us in even bigger trouble than before. If we'd kitted him out in steel it might have been different as steel is more resilient against Spinning weapons and flame weapons, but the weight might have been too much for the engine to handle. Either way, say hello to the Robot Wars Champion. And then good bye to the robot wars champion because for now we're retiring the Accident, but an old friend has some new tricks.
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Feb 15, 2016 23:53
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Manic_Misanthrope posted:because for now we're retiring the Accident, THAT THING IS NOT COMING BACK DAMNIT!
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Feb 15, 2016 23:57
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 In which Manic and I declare Rambo to be King of the Vikings.
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Feb 17, 2016 11:35
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Oh wow, a The Tick reference! ... I think.
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Feb 17, 2016 12:54
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Zanzibar Ham posted:Oh wow, a The Tick reference! I have confirmed that it does indeed reference both parts of that all important quote, although I butcher it just a little bit. For those who don't get the reference?  I AM THE MAD MIDNIGHT BOMBER, WHAT BOMBS AT MIDNIGHT, AHAHAHAAHAAAA!
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Feb 17, 2016 13:49
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