Robotron: 2084

I constantly flip between three video games for my favorite of all-time: Star Control II, Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, and this one right here, the mighty Robotron: 2084. 35 years since it came out I still have not gotten tired of playing it; its fast-paced, easy to learn but hard to master twin-stick gameplay has provided infinite depth. A bad game can last two minutes, a good one maybe five, and a great (and rare) one upwards of ten. "One more try!" is the lifeblood of this game.

Robotron doesn't just excel in gameplay, however. On the attract screen, you are briefly presented with a dystopian sci-fi story about how robots have nearly wiped out humanity in the year 2084, and you as a superhuman must rescue the survivors by shooting the robots and collecting the wandering people. The imagery is iconic, from tank-like robots to giant-brained mindstealers. Even in an era that produced video game iconography that lives to this day (think of the characters from Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, etc.), Robotron stands out.

Last but certainly not least are the game's sound effects. Robotron was always the loudest machine in the room, its high-pitched squeals and machine gun-like pulses of bass were startling. Between the fast paced gameplay, doomsday story and aggressive sound effects, Robotron sought to steal your attention, and every game is a white knuckle, high strung experience. You could say Robotron: 2084 was the birth of a punk rock style of gaming, loud and aggressive and in your face.

Robotron: 2084 might just be the single coolest arcade game I've played for sooo many different reasons. The visuals are especially impressive to me with the absolute cacophony of flashing lights and colours set to a flat black background being such a great way to convey the neon lit hellscape in which everything takes place. Basically everything demands the player's direct attention just from a purely visual standpoint, and are crafted in such a way that even at a glance you can tell where things are despite the maelstrom of clashing and intersecting explosions and shapes darting across the screen. It's also another case where the utterly brutal difficulty you could come to expect from a game at the time felt pretty interestingly contextualised within the tone and narrative of the game itself, which is always neat, not to mention that the tone itself is unbelievably bleak.

The game is set after a robot uprising that renders basically all of humanity dead, but rather than being a story of trying to do what you can to restore hope, everything is more akin to a desperate scramble just to maybe cling onto your life for a bit longer. There is no hope here, only doing what you can to extend your own life and that of the last remaining human family for that extra bit of time solely for the sake of not wanting to die, and in the end, it's pointless, there's no winning, just endless waves of increasingly aggressive and twisted death robots all desiring little more than your destruction. I also really like the pacing of the game and the way this further ties into these ideas, as rather than a more typical formula you'd come to expect where it takes a bit to get going and reach the tricky stuff that'll kill you, extra lives usually being a huge milestone in terms of score, this game throws you into the deep end and you just need to adapt to the chaos as quickly as possible. Extra lives are so common that by the 10th wave (each lasting at most 30 seconds) you'll probably have gained at least 4 extra lives as long as you've been playing well, but even if this it's likely that you'll have died by then enough times to not even see what awaits you.

I feel like this further contributes to the bleak desperation of the situation the player finds themselves in where there are so many situations where rather than even thinking about "how am I going to beat this huge wave?" you instead immediately start considering if it's possible to score enough for another extra life so you can inevitably get torn to shreds one more time and hold off the enemies for another few moments. It's definitely a unique take on this type of game to use lives as almost an active resource where it'll be a bit of a tempo reset if you die and put you back into a more advantageous position momentarily rather than simply being there to count the amount of mistakes you make. Obviously you still never really want to die in this game at any point, but it seems like the game gears it more towards each individual death not really being especially catastrophic. It all culminates in an awesome little time that I've been playing on and off for a while now, and while there are certain frustrating elements such as the game being obscenely fast with some erratic bullet patterns being practically impossible to dodge, the whole experience is something that I think is really impressive and engaging, especially with some absolutely amazing art direction backing it all up.

This game is a masterpiece

Man, this is a depressing game. It doesn't help that you have to save the last remaining human family(and fail since you can only get a game over at this arcade), doomed to extinction, but it's also so hyper, so brain-twisting, so brutal, with exploding noises and flashes everywhere it makes you weary of this robotic bloodshed and just want to give up. What is your cause? What are you fighting for? Violence is not the answer. Only despair is left.

As an action game though it's a treaded formula(Berzerk did this style of gameplay earlier) but the idea of providing a twin stick action is a revolutionary one and it provides immediacy.

I do give it props for the twin stick shooting, but it has aged pretty badly. The flashing lights and high pitched sounds tend to make me very tired of this game after playing it a little while. The game is really hard considering the amount of enemies and projectiles on screen and that everything kills you in 1 hit. It must have been a technical marvel at the time, but from a gameplay perspective things have evolved a great lot since then.