BOTZ ALIVE

Robots in disguise! While this was my first attendance at Botcon, I have to admit, that it wasn’t as crazy as I thought it would have been. The size of the center that was used in Providence, RI may have dumbed down the event a little yet, it didn’t take away the “kid in a candy store” feeling from just walking around the floor and gleaming at the shear amount of robots only $5 and up away.

Among the events were the obvious, vendors selling bots that your best friends may have broken from years ago, and newer more fancy looking peaces like the chibi-bots from Hasbro. I still couldn’t find my Jaz-chibi so I came home bot-less. A far cry some of the other members of TGHz though who spent upteen dollars on some very fancy toy-ware.

Among the other events, and since we cover games here at TGHz, was the more serious Activision Gamer Panel held to discuss the Transformers game for all the systems that it was developed for. The developers on the panel pointed that the main theme they were going for was size, scale and destruction. There is some proof to this, as the online gamers for the DS, and other systems, all tag up with the evil robot factions since it allows them to do more damage and destruction when playing online. On a side note, the Autobots has only won one daily match since the online daily wars has been held. The hardest thing they pointed out was getting a good feel for the game out. That is to say, that a game like this hasn’t been done before and they focused primarily on how users would expect the game to feel and play. Another issue was content, being that the robots are big, the fact that they would be able to lift larger than human objects was a must. Since this is a movie-title, panel members pointed out that they expected the game to receive criticism but also pointed out that given the sensitivity of the title and its characters, they had worked on it for about 4 years cross platform. The hardest part was getting hints from developers over at ILM and direction from Michael Bay. An interesting point came up at this point as they noted that the weapons design for the game came last and then began laying down things like voiceovers. The voice over got the royal treatment as Frank himself loaned his voice for Optimus. For the G1 fanatics, they pointed out that the G1 bots are available as un-lockable content citing that the main difference between the console and hand held versions is only graphical.

With regards to cheats and un-lockable content, certain G1 robots will not benefit those Game Point Hunger XBox fans as they will not be able to earn points while cheats that they have earned are on. Other than that, the game is a solid attempt, even though it is based off of a film.