Video Game / Rise of the Robots

Following

Rise Of The Robots is a Fighting Game released in 1994 for the IBM PC, Amiga, Game Gear, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Genesis, 3DO Interactive Multiplayer and Philips CD-i.

The game's premise is as follows: The Supervisor, a T-1000 Expy with boobs, is the central robot in charge of a large robotics plant. All is going well, until a computer virus suddenly gives her sentience. She transmits the virus to the rest of the plant's robot workers, causing them to kill all the humans inside and try to find a way to connect to the outside mainframe. The only way to prevent The Supervisor from uploading the virus to the rest of the city is to kill her. Enter Coton, a cloned Cyborg programmed to fight his way to the Supervisor's lair and kick her highly textured ass.

A sequel, Rise 2: Resurrection, was released on the PC, PlayStation, and Sega Saturn in 1996. This one featured a new cast of characters, on top of the returning robots, and numerous gameplay improvements. However, many find it too similar to other successful fighting games.

This series contains examples of:

• A Winner Is You:
  • All you get for beating the Supervisor in the first game is a shot of her exploding, then a brief sentence of text and a clip show of all the FMV sequences in the game that repeats until you reset.
  • Beating Rise 2 gives you a generic "You kicked the Supervisor's butt" ending, with the lines repeating in different variations.
• The Bad Guy Wins: In the story for Rise 2: Resurrection, the Supervisor manages to defeat and absorb the Cyborg, destroying his body and copying his brain patterns to the rest of her robots.
• Artificial Stupidity: Most enemies can be easily beaten by just backing them into a corner and kicking them to death. Sometimes your opponent will even just drop all pretenses and walk into the corner themselves.
  • The Sentry can be easily flummoxed by just crouching and kicking. Watch as he flails around with his spinning roundhouse over your head and only occasionally gets a hit or two in.
  • All this is especially ironic given how the marketing boasted about the game's allegedly complex AI and how your opponents learn from their mistakes.
• Big Bad: The Supervisor, a corrupted robot hellbent on destroying the city with the virus that infected her.
• Body Snatcher: Coton in Rise 2 simply possesses whatever robot you chose to play as.
• Captain Ersatz: The Supervisor is essentially a Gender Flip of the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgment Day. She starts out showing off her hand blades, and she melts to the ground when defeated.
• Chrome Champion: The Cyborg, while the Supervisor is his Evil Counterpart (but with shapeshifting.)
• Cigar Chomper: Builder, inexplicably.
• Covers Always Lie: Most console versions advertised the music by Brian May, however only one of his songs (the intro theme) made it into these ports.
• Digitized Sprites: The graphics used pre-rendered 3D backgrounds and sprites, with incredibly fluid animations for each character.
• Excuse Plot: The second game for the most part.
• Failsafe Failure: Subverted. The Supervisor's programmers actually thought ahead, and didn't give her access to any network outside the factory in case something like this happened. Doubly Subverted when she absorbs the Cyborg's mind, letting her transmit the virus over a larger area.
• Fake Difficulty: Each opponent has similar AI to the last, their attacks simply do more damage (which completely breaks two-player mode, especially since one player has to control the Cyborg.)
  • Hard mode is also guilty of blatant controller reading.
  • Not to mention that there's no continues. At all. In a fighting game.
• Finishing Move: Rise 2 allowed you to perform E-X-E-C-U-T-I-O-N-S on your defeated foes at the end of a match.
• Game-Breaking Bug: The game can freeze if Supervisor loses a round by time out.
• A God Am I: The Supervisor's view on things, post-virus.
• Have a Nice Death: Rise of the Robots shows a FMV depicting the Cyborg being defeated if you lose a match. Likewise, all the other robots are given the same treatment.
• Healthy Green, Harmful Red: In some ports, the characters' full health bar is depicted in green, and changes its colour to yellow, then to a dark shade of red: SNES port; Genesis port.
• Lightning Bruiser: In Rise of the Robots, while each enemy gets progressively difficult, the Sentry Droid is big, bulky, and does the most damage yet, with size not hindering him at all.
• Mascot Mook: Of all the robots in the first game, Builder ends up getting the most screentime after Cyborg, being used for the continue screen in versions that allow continues, as well as the game over screen in said versions.
• Re-Release Soundtrack: The game was heavily advertised as featuring music by Brian May. However, the developers got into rights issues with EMI. Rather than delaying the game to resolve them, May's music was switched out with techno music by Fuzzy and Clownlogic. The Brian May soundtrack was eventually included on the 3DO and CD-i versions, letting the player choose between it or the Fuzzy and Clownlogic soundtrack.
• Spam Attack: In Rise, it's very possible to go through the whole game on easy and normal by walking up to your opponent and kick them to death.
• Totally Radical: The ending for Rise 2: Resurrection is nothing but the game telling you you kicked butt for nearly a minute.