robots: Destroy him, my robots

Apparently, nobody told the authors of robots about the Three Laws of Robotics. Everyone knows robots would never do anything to harm humans.

But there they go, doing their best to charge into our hero, and end his organic existence.

Another gem from bsd-games, robots isn’t particularly challenging. You won’t get flashbacks to Berzerk or Robotron 2084, even if they are contemporaries of a sort.

On the other hand, robots is a good example of how simple rules can make for a clever game.

Everybody moves one space, in any direction. If a robot touches you, you scream in agony and the game is over.

On the other hand, if two robots collide, they are reduced to rubble, which stays on the screen as an obstacle. If a robot touches an obstacle, it becomes a trash heap too. There’s your strategy.

You don’t get any weapons, but as an added twist, you have the option to teleport at any time. Which comes in handy, as you might imagine.

In its early rounds, robots is rather easy. In fact, the only way I ever died in early games was by teleporting onto a robot. Which does sometimes happen.

But later games become quite hectic. You have to count out your moves and make sure you don’t end up as a pile of charcoal. And with a lot of robots on the screen, your chances of teleporting onto one of them becomes rather intimidating.

All the same, I think you can work out a fairly simple way to win, almost every game. After all, humans are so much smarter than robots. 🙄

P.S.: Use the -A flag to let the computer play against itself. Careful, though. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. …