10. Deathbots
Instructions
Instructions
(pg 3-4)
Deathbots needs its own P.O. Box for all the hate mail it deserves.
Oh look, it's found right on the title screen for convenience. (Damned
Massachusetts Liberals!) From the digitalized squeaks of flatulence
that is the title screen music to the anorexic "deathbots" in
the game, this is "Star Wars" done on a fifteen dollar buget
and inside of some schmuck's damp basement. When a game comes along that
is this bad, it makes reviewing so difficult for the constant fear of
missing every horrible nuance. Most everything in Deathbots barely
works; graphics are sparse, character movements constipating, hit-or-miss
hit detection, constant pop up, clipping problems up the wazoo, and doors
that don't like to open when you want to go through them. To fathom a
company thought this actually warranted a release just goes to show how
correct Nintendo was for setting up such a harsh evalution system of licensed
video titles after the whole Atari debacle. If games such as this were
to have suddenly flooded the market, Nintendo would have risen the sails
of the video game industry and piloted it right into a fucking badly-drawn
rock jetty.
Sometimes modest unlicensed NES games hold a certain charm to them, even if they aren't as refined or fancy as major releases. Deathbots fits strangely into this category. The game Odyssey Software was reaching for was surely too much of an ambitious project for them. Deathbots features free movement from an overhead view. A typical stage involves plowing through hoards of cyborg robots, collecting various health and weapon items, equiping said items from the select screen, opening a lot of doors, travelling to different sectors via red teleporters, and finally coming face to face with a oversized boss bot at the end. That formula goes on for six levels, or at least as many you manage to survive for. The programmers attempted to balance the faulty controls and hit detection by offering six life bars, plenty of health pick-ups, 4 tries after you die, and 4 continues (which is good because eventually you'll use your guy as a kamikaze just to get through the levels). From time to time you'll come across a computer screen that reads "Access Denied." I'm not sure the significance of these moments, because the teleporters and doors do not require any sort of keys. Chalk it up to another "nuance."
In the
end, Deathbots could have used much more glitch combing. It's fun
for what it is, but that ain't much. 
YOU'VE SEEN THEM SUCK, AND NOW SEE 'DEATHBOTS' DANCE!
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