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*
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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 😅
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.
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!
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
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! 🎉🥳🎉
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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!
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!
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
@@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.
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!
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 UA-cam consisting of smaller, but just as competetive weighclasses
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
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!
This video had memories rushing back to me of a PC Small Soldiers licensed game that I had growing up. Build your solider toy out of various good guy/bad guy parts and weapons and then battle on a kid's bedroom desk. I have to check and see if it's on myabandonware or something now.
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
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...
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.
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.
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! ❤
All I ever remember from Gabriel Interactive was one of their many John Deere licensed games. Had no idea they had something that was more than just old farming sims!
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 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
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
They’re actually kinda notorious for publishing shovelware but they were one of the only publishers back then willing to take random indie teams, since you couldn’t just publish games on Steam
For me, bargain bin deal, it would be Warrior King(s) and Killing Floor. Both games in diferent years have been found by me in barging bin at my local shop for price of a energy drink. Loved and still love both of them
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?
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.
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
"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.
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
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
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!!
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.
11:16 You can do WHAT to the bot??? 😳
@@JWhite-qi5zv Edge
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.
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
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😂😂😂
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
Modding this game for modern systems is a must and greatly expands the scope including adding old robot wars robots like Razor.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
i remember this game! so much fun for this engineer. Even the cannonball cheat weapon was fun.
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
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
I loved this game. My brother and i played it all the damn time. Seems like just yesterday and now im 32 years old!
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!
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!
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
Old school Battle Bots is a certified hood classic.
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.
2:52 ohhh yea that nostalgia feel..
I can almost feel my little sister breathing down my neck wanting to see more robo carnage!
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
As someone who was big and still somewhat apart of the RA2 community, I love this game finally getting love!
Glad to see the intro come back! Great video as always
Glad your growing from your nft roots. Old fun games sound nice
Im glad Im not the only person that got deeply relieved at the reveal in the second half. I knew I wasn't crazy.
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.
Love this review! I like seeing non nft reviews from you :D And this game struck nostalgia, haha!
YOU BROUGHT BACK THE OLD INTRO! Love your content and the insane growth your channel has seen, keep it up! :)
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.
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 love this video, I know you normally do NFT stuff but THIS Is quality. Thanks my man.
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.
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 had a technology class in middle school and one of the stations was just playing this game, best class ever.
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!
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
thank you jauwn for battling these bots
you are very welcome
I absolutely loved this game when younger...thank you for covering it
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of my favorite games still chasing the high of the building and fighting systems
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.
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
I have always loved battlebots, great video!
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.
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 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.
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 🪄
YES! Another obscure video game deep dive from Jauwn! I’ve been scratching at my neck, jonesing for my next hit ever since Diggles!
I hope in 2029, Jawn drops a "metaverse" thats just Lyra but with no way to deal damage to one another.
我爱ＣＲＹＰＴＯＣＵＲＲＥＮＣＹ
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 UA-cam consisting of smaller, but just as competetive weighclasses
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 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?
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!
This video had memories rushing back to me of a PC Small Soldiers licensed game that I had growing up. Build your solider toy out of various good guy/bad guy parts and weapons and then battle on a kid's bedroom desk. I have to check and see if it's on myabandonware or something now.
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
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...
8:57 free form body shape?! For that era of games that is quite impressive
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.
I'm JUST NOW HEARING ABOUT THIS?!
I'm gonna have to try this out, this looks REALLY fun
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 played the shit out of this as a kid, loved it so much! The building system was genuinely great, especially for the time.
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
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! ❤
All I ever remember from Gabriel Interactive was one of their many John Deere licensed games. Had no idea they had something that was more than just old farming sims!
I remember getting this game and Majesty in the bin at dollar general.
Why do i feel nostalgic for a game i didnt knew exists?
this game set me back a whole $3 on ebay in 2007, i had played the first one and had no idea a sequel had been out for 4 years
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.
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 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
As much as I love your NFT game content, seeing you branch out like this is so cool.
Hidden memory unlocked, thanks, downloading it!
Battle bots was my childhood. How did I never hear of this game!?! I would have lost my mind!
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
2:39 infogrames really knew how to make grames.
They’re actually kinda notorious for publishing shovelware but they were one of the only publishers back then willing to take random indie teams, since you couldn’t just publish games on Steam
Finally, more Jauwn content!
New Year, New Content!
I need more jauwndice!
An absolute BANGER. Hours lost on this game by little me around twelve years old.
”I must say, I was impressed that she made proper use of the word myriad in her suicide note"
This game was incredible. I can't comprehend why no other game has made the building part of a robot building game so well.
I LOVE when games have flavor text for things.
For me, bargain bin deal, it would be Warrior King(s) and Killing Floor.
Both games in diferent years have been found by me in barging bin at my local shop for price of a energy drink.
Loved and still love both of them
I just found you and I'm glad I did, I really like your videos!