Robot Odyssey

The Good
In Robot Odyssey, you find yourself lost in the world of Robotropolis. At your disposal are three robots - Sparky, Scanner, and Checkers. Using your trusty soldering iron and toolbox full of logic gates (AND, OR, XOR, and NOT), you must continually rewire the brains of your robot friends to help you escape.

Many of the puzzles in Robotropolis are "hands-off". That is, your character cannot actually wander into the room that contains the puzzle. Instead, you need to program your robots to solve the puzzles for you. Some of the early puzzles can be solved by a single robot, and you're allowed to ride around inside the bots and rewire them on the fly. But many of the later puzzles require you to program all three robots to communicate with each other (using antenna pulses) to carry out small portions of a singular greater task, and you can't interfere once they enter the puzzle area. So once you set them in motion, you'd better hope your circuit designs work - otherwise, you lose your robots FOREVER! (Or, until you reload a saved game.)

Oh, did I mention that you also need to program your robots to come back to you once they solve the puzzle?

To me, there was something that was unbelievably cool about making these little robots do tricks. You have absolute freedom in how you wire your 'bots. I'll always remember how I felt when I finally figured out how to solve the "Form-12 Vending Machine" puzzle on Level 3 (a "hands-off" puzzle requiring communication, teamwork, and timing between at least two robots).

Another nice feature about this game is that it's actually two "games". One aspect of it is "Robotropolis", which is the actual "game" part.

The other aspect is the "Innovation Lab". It's basically a sandbox for you to test out new circuit designs for your robots. You have a prototype microchip that you can rewire arbitrarily, and then burn onto smaller chips. These smaller chips can be saved into the game's Chip Library, so you can use them at any time during the "Robotropolis" part of the game.

Here's an example of the Innovation Lab - In at least one Robotropolis puzzle, two robots had to navigate copies of a maze, each in a seperate room. One room was the "map room", which was basically a maze where a robot could bounce around off the walls as it liked. But the second room was the "minefield" room. Not only were the maze walls invisible in this room, but if a robot touched them, it would have its battery drained, and its circuits wiped clean, effectively becoming "dead". And since your character can't actually enter the minefield room, if your robot gets fried, it's effectively out of the game. I remember spending a week in the Innovation Lab desigining a specific microchip that could be used in both robots to solve this particular puzzle. Using this chip, the "guide" robot in the map room would "know" that it was the guide, and it would broadcast periodic guidance signals over its antenna. The robot in the "minefield" room would "know" that it was in the minefield, and it would react to the signals accordingly to change its movement vector to avoid the deadly invisible walls.

That was just damn cool.

There's a large area of the Lab that has mutable walls. By changing your cursor into paintbrush-mode, you can add or remove walls in this area as you choose. The ability to "paint" your own walls comes in quite handy, since you can effectively replicate any Robotropolis puzzle within the Lab this way.

The Bad
Once you hit Level Four in this game, the puzzles become devious. They were certainly beyond my abilities, as a kid. I've recently found a copy of this game, and I've been replaying it over the past week - I was able to blow through all of the puzzles up to Level Four. Some of them were quite a challenge - even some of the puzzles on Level Five are easier.

I suppose, this being the year 2003 and all, I should make some remarks about this game's graphics and sound. They're craptacular. CGA, and PC speaker beeps. It's not a first person shooter. Hell, in early versions of this game, your character didn't look like a goofy little person -- he looked like a white square.

But you know, this is one of those games that doesn't need to look cool, to be cool.

The Bottom Line
How would I describe this game to others? Simple:

Nineteen years ago, when I was around 7 or 8 years old, my mom bought this game for me in an attempt to teach me about logic. "Well, okay. Computers are kinda boring and intimidating, but I guess robots are neat," I said.

I ended up playing the hell out of this game as a kid, because I loved teaching my little robots to do tricks.

Today, I'm a computer programmer. I love teaching high-powered servers to do tricks.