What happens is that animatronic robots fight. It's sort of like watching super-stiff mixed martial arts guys swing away. To be blunt, the fights are comically clumsy, though some hydraulic fluid squirts around and there are lots of sparks.
You can watch the first episode here. Just skip to the 32nd minute or so and you'll miss a lot of padding. The entire episode only offers about three minutes of actual fighting, and eventually things fizzle out into a fluid-leaking TKO. Pretty anticlimactic, I'm afraid.
Let's face it, I'm not the target demo for this stuff. But if you're male and on the front side of thirty years old, you might enjoy the few minutes of actual combat. It's still hard to count Robot Combat League as a game show, though other game show sites are covering it. I'll just call it Popular Mechanics Sports Illustrated.
It's not a game show in the sense of Jeopardy, but reality competitions are just about the only "new" game shows these days. I liked the fight, and I thought it was much more fluid an fast paced than I was expecting. Remember, this is only the first episode, so a lot of that padding was needed for proper exposition. I think as the teams learn to better control the bots, and customize them, this show can only get better.
ReplyDeleteStill very cool though. And think about what this means beyond the show. The future of robotics is looking bright all of a sudden
Fluid and fast-paced? Um, okay. Compared to the MMA guys, the robots looked to me like they were moving in very thick oil. And I'm sorry, but the padding was just ridiculous. An hour-long episode for, what, maybe three minutes of "action"?
ReplyDeleteBut like I said, I'm not the target demo for this stuff. By the way, I disagree that reality competitions are the only new game shows nowadays. In fact, we've had quite a few traditional game shows debut over the past 12-18 months. Even SyFy tried one, though the ratings faded badly over Total Blackout's run.