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R.O.B./Family Robot |
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R.O.B./Family Robot |
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| Here we have R.O.B., or Robotic
Operating Buddy, from Nintendo, also known as Family Robot in Japan. R.O.B. is a small
robot which sits on your desktop or floor, etc. He has 2 arms with 2 platforms on each
arm. He has a few plastic disks and such he can manipulate (anyone have the specifics on
this?) I believe he connects to port one on the NES, and you control him with a standard
controller on port 2, though I can't be sure, it might be the other way around. What is R.O.B. supposed to do, you might ask? Well, officially, R.O.B. is an interactive game interface between the game and the player. Basically, you tell R.O.B. to do stuff using the NES controller, and he does them, affecting game play. For example, you tell R.O.B. to pick up a block and he does and the game responds to this. You need to time R.O.B.'s actions with the onscreen action , since there is a delay in when you tell R.O.B. to do something and when he actually does it and gameplay affected. It sounds like a neat idea, but in practice, R.O.B. is just a gimmick, and gimmick that actually worked well in selling NES units in the US. At least very early in the life of the NES. The idea was to give the 'ol standard video game system a new look, and make it appear that the NES was new and cool and not like those old pre-crash consoles. Well, at the time, US gamers didn't know this, but support for R.O.B. was dead in Japan, as it was being released in the US. There were only two games released for R.O.B., Stack-Up and Gyromite. The games are identical to the Japanese versions; in fact, the title screen of Gyromite says "Robot Gyro", the Japanese title of the game, they didn't even bother to change the title screen and put in the US title! Gyromite came with R.O.B., you could buy Stack-Up separately, and as one can guess, Stack-Up is quite rare. As a side note, many early copies of Gyromite contain a FC 60 pin PCB, attached to a 60-72 pin NES adaptor inside, and many have copies of the game have been cannabalized for the adaptor inside. Another point of interest here, is that you can play Gyromite with a standard controller, and you don't need the robot at all. Anyone know if you can do this with Stack-Up? R.O.B was only released in the US, Japan, and Canada (the Canadian R.O.B. came in a bilingual box, which you can see above, and probably the instructions were bilingual also (can anyone verify?). I don't believe R.O.B. was released in any PAL market (Europe, UK, Austalia, Asia). Today, R.O.B. is quite a collector's item, and can fetch $100+ for a
complete set (which is rare, since many of those plastic blocks etc were lost). If
you are a NES freak, a R.O.B. is a must-have in your collection! |
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