New hotness on iOS & Android: Revenge of the Rob-o-Bot

[jhamdotme]

Launch Trailer


The best new pinball table on iOS is not from Zen or Farsight, or even LittleWing. It's not from A.S.K. Homework, and it's damn sure not from Gameprom. It's "Revenge of the Rob-o-Bot", and it's from Color Monkey. Who?

Yeah, this is the first I’ve heard of them, too. But hopefully, they'll stick around for a while. I’m having more fun with this one than I am with anything that I’ve played lately from those other guys.

There’s voice acting and missions, and the ball feels great. It's built on top of a very impressive pinball engine from NENA, and it's fast and silky smooth, at least on the iPhone 5 that I’ve been playing it with. It's Universal, it's optimized for 4" screens, and it can be played in either landscape or portrait. There’s one view for each orientation, and it very gently zooms in and out. But to me, it really feels like it's meant to be played vertically. The screen space really feels wasted when you're playing it horizontally.

The table is beautiful and has this great retro feel to it, with a ’50s robot theme and something about the impending destruction of a "lesbionic" metropolis. Awesome.

There’s a third flipper at the top left, and it reacts differently than any flipper I’ve ever seen. When touching the left side of the screen to activate this extra flipper, it fires, like you'd expect, but then it immediately returns. If you press and hold, your bottom left flipper will stay activated, but the extra flipper retracts immediately, no matter what. It's strange, for sure, but it feels interesting in play.

The music and the mechanical sounds are great, and there are some impressive lighting effects throughout the game. When the game zooms out between balls, or during a pause in the game, you can see a great big dot matrix display, and there are some impressive animations. When you're playing, though, the view doesn’t really show this display. Instead, during gameplay, there’s a much thinner display that's shown, floating above the table, that has your score and also, on occasion, miniaturized animations. But if you look closely, you'll see that the larger DMD is still there, reflected, in real time, off of the table's glass. It's an impressive effect, it's perfectly smooth, and even with this, I’ve never once seen the gameplay hiccup, not even for a second.

The third flipper fires the ball toward Rob-o-Bot, the titular character who sits at the top right of the table. This is the invader you're fighting off, and he's the catalyst for the missions. The character is very reminiscent of Rudy, in a good way, and his eyes follow the ball just like in Funhouse. It's very cool.

The ball moves fast and it reacts naturally. There’s just the right amount of friction, and it bounces perfectly off of the bumpers and the flippers. You can even do dead flipper passes pretty consistently.

The game is hard, though, but in a good way. For the longest time, I couldn't even complete any of the missions, but it never felt frustrating. Even though you have a ball-save feature for quick drains and kickbacks activated on each of the two out lanes, a lot of games go by pretty quickly, at least for me. This, according to their home page, is by design. It's supposed to be hard.

I find this refreshing. With Zen games lasting sometimes a half hour, and with Farsight neutering a lot of their tables, it somehow feels good when you shoot a ball halfway up a ramp and it drains right down the middle; you should've nudged it. It doesn’t feel cheap when the ball rolls past your upper flipper and drains right into the right out lane. Instead, it feels like, "damn, I missed it and I messed up, I’ll get it next time."

I love this game, and I think you will, too. It's a steal at $2.99. I know it was just released, but when I look at the Game Center leaderboards, there's not even a hundred players yet. It would be criminal if this didn't succeed, and if it didn't make these guys truckloads of money. So do your part and download this, and here's to hoping that we'll be getting more tables from these guys in the future.

I’ve played nearly every pinball table in the App Store, and this one's my new favorite. Time will tell, but I don't think it's because it's the newest. Home run, Color Monkey. Buy this.

 

[night]

I bought it for my iPad. One thing that I really miss is 'options'; I like to set the camera movement on 'steady'. Now it's hovering over the table all the time, this makes my head dizzy... (I do this with TPA often). An I am serious, my head still feels weird, and I know this might be a personal problem, but all the tables I know have this possibility somewhere buried in the preferences. So OPTIONS please!
Game graphics looks good (vector images, not pixel-based) lighting effects are good, DMD art is good. Played it too short to make a good report. Can't say it's comparable with what TPA does, this is a fantasy table, not realistic in terms of a replica of a real table. But a well made one for sure.

 

[mmmagnetic]

Man, I LOVE toy robots! I´ll make sure to check this one out

 

[karl]

Thanks for the tip. Just downloaded. I like it more than Zen (but then again I have very little love for Zen. It just bores me to death) Not as good as Crystal Caliburn 2 but this could very well be the second best all digital pinball game for the IPAD (Not counting TPA of course)

 

[squidlr]

Looks great - definitely buying this if I make the purchase on an iPad mini. Beautiful art style, and the game engine looks very smooth.

 

[squidlr]

I fired off a quick email to the company - they said that they are also planning to work on an Android and Mac OS X version, sometime after they have finished content for the iOS game.

 

[gsxrboy]

Chunky Blippy Sounds !

I'm in.

*goes to purchase*

 

[Anders]

Hey!

I got a Google alert from this forum and found it to be pretty funny that it came from the TPA forum I'm one of the devs of this game and I'm stoked to read that you guys like it! We are big fans of TPA as well, fav table is def Medieval Madness. But I'm still waiting for T2 and Indiana Jones!

Anyway, like I said, I'm stoked to hear that you guys like it, and I'd really appreciate your feedback as you guys are our target audience (i.e. pinball lovers), so keep the feedback coming. Mind you this is our FIRST pinball game, hopefully the first of many

squidlr >> I'm the one who replied to you btw

 

[karl]

Hope you make many more Anders. Having a lot of fun with your product. The game is really well done. You can tell that you guys know your pinball. There is so many bad IPAD games that claim to be the best pinball game out there, makes is hard to find a decent one when it comes along.
Nice of you to drop by and don't be a stranger

 

[jaredmorgs]

Re: New hotness on iOS: Revenge of the Rob-o-Bot

Hey!

I got a Google alert from this forum and found it to be pretty funny that it came from the TPA forum I'm one of the devs of this game and I'm stoked to read that you guys like it! We are big fans of TPA as well, fav table is def Medieval Madness. But I'm still waiting for T2 and Indiana Jones!

Anyway, like I said, I'm stoked to hear that you guys like it, and I'd really appreciate your feedback as you guys are our target audience (i.e. pinball lovers), so keep the feedback coming. Mind you this is our FIRST pinball game, hopefully the first of many

squidlr >> I'm the one who replied to you btw

If you want a few Android beta testers for the product, just head on over to the android forum. We love testing. And our rates are pretty damn cheap ;-)

Good luck with the iOS release, Anders.

 

[jhamdotme]

Random observations and niggles:

• The icon is branded "Rob-o-Bot", with a lowercase "o", but throughout the game and in the achievements, the "o" is capitalized. It doesn’t matter which way you do this, but you should probably be consistent.
• During the rescue mission, when I hit the right shot, I’ll hear "one more time". But it's rarely ever just one more time that I need to hit this shot. Sometimes, it takes three or four shots to complete this mission. Something's off here.
• The 321 countdown is nice when returning from a pause, but it's unnecessary when the ball hasn't been fired into the playfield yet.
• The pause menu is disabled during the ball lost points tally. I'd like to be able to get to the pause menu even during this part of the game. (Ahem.)
• There's no indication at the end of the game when you've beaten your high score. There should be fanfare here to highlight this.
• On a few occasions, I’ve had part of the audio drop out. I’m not sure what triggers this, and I can’t reliably reproduce this, but every once in a while, the voice samples will stop working. Everything else is fine, seemingly, but until I restart the game, I’m getting only some of the sounds.
• There should probably be a static camera view. I play mostly on the iPhone 5, where with the taller screen it doesn’t scroll as much, but on the iPad, the camera actually affects gameplay. Often, the view will be zoomed toward the top of the playfield, and you won't have enough time to adjust the lit lanes at the bottom of the screen. This makes it harder to re-activate your kickbacks when playing on the iPad.
• I really dig the DMD animation in your teaser trailer, setting up the story. I don't know if this would blow up your app's size, as a video, or if you could render it in-engine, but you should include it with the game somehow. It's very cool.
• Sometimes, the mission objectives are still a little confusing, especially at first. I think the lights could be tweaked a little to highlight a little better what you're supposed to be shooting for. Maybe there could be voice acting, too, to direct your shots.
• Alternatively, or in addition, you could post a rule sheet somewhere, on your website or in the app. Ideally, there'd be step-by-step instructions, like how it's done in Pinball Arcade.
• It should be possible to play music from another app in the background, while playing the game. And if somebody is playing music from another app in the background, they should be able to choose whether or not they want to hear sound effects, perhaps even with a control to adjust the volume.
• I tried cradling a ball for a while, to get a pinball status report. I was disappointed when this didn't work.
• Why are there separate leaderboards for the iPhone and iPad version?
• You mentioned you'd like to make more tables. I’m looking forward to this. But if you do make more, it'd be great if you could somehow consolidate all of your tables into a single app. I’m not sure about everybody else here, but I’d much rather have everything all together, where I can get new tables with an in-app purchase. My pinball folder overfloweth.

Having said all that, I really do love this table. I’ve been evangelizing this as best I can, here and over at Touch Arcade. (It's gotta be frustrating that they just front-paged the much inferior Monster Pinball HD. Hopefully, you'll get the same treatment.)

Anyway, I hope more people find this, and I hope you have lots of success.

 

[squidlr]

Hey!

I got a Google alert from this forum and found it to be pretty funny that it came from the TPA forum I'm one of the devs of this game and I'm stoked to read that you guys like it! We are big fans of TPA as well, fav table is def Medieval Madness. But I'm still waiting for T2 and Indiana Jones!

Anyway, like I said, I'm stoked to hear that you guys like it, and I'd really appreciate your feedback as you guys are our target audience (i.e. pinball lovers), so keep the feedback coming. Mind you this is our FIRST pinball game, hopefully the first of many

squidlr >> I'm the one who replied to you btw

It's a small world!

Welcome to the forum and good luck with the game!

 

[Nik Barbour]

Yes Please - Would definately like this on Android!

 

[gsxrboy]

Hi Anders,

Thanks for the table

If you are keen on making more, personally I much prefer a "collection" type app with DLC, (as per TPA, Zen etc), inside it rather than lots of individual table apps. It's just nicer and neater for me, I think. I'm not sure how this would go with your ideas on marketing though and what your thoughts are on it. It would mean renaming this first release to something and having the Revenge table as the first purchased table. Love to hear what you think.

 

[Anders]

Hope you make many more Anders. Having a lot of fun with your product. The game is really well done. You can tell that you guys know your pinball. There is so many bad IPAD games that claim to be the best pinball game out there, makes is hard to find a decent one when it comes along.
Nice of you to drop by and don't be a stranger

Thanks! Yeah we love pinball and play fairly regularly on real tables. I have a special jar dedicated for pinball

I'll try to be as active as possible!

(And sorry to the TPA devs, don't mean to hijack your fan forum)

 

[Anders]

Yes Please - Would definately like this on Android!

It all boils down to how well the game is received, but we do have plans for Android, Mac, Steam, PSN, Xbox, microwaves and washing machines. And probably some more. What's going to take time is to do proper ports, I have when a game feels like it's meant/designed for another platform.

 

[Anders]

Hi Anders,

Thanks for the table

If you are keen on making more, personally I much prefer a "collection" type app with DLC, (as per TPA, Zen etc), inside it rather than lots of individual table apps. It's just nicer and neater for me, I think. I'm not sure how this would go with your ideas on marketing though and what your thoughts are on it. It would mean renaming this first release to something and having the Revenge table as the first purchased table. Love to hear what you think.

Yup, I agree, and we plan to go this route. No need for an "arcade" just yet though

 

[Anders]

Random observations and niggles:

...

Having said all that, I really do love this table. I’ve been evangelizing this as best I can, here and over at Touch Arcade. (It's gotta be frustrating that they just front-paged the much inferior Monster Pinball HD. Hopefully, you'll get the same treatment.)

Anyway, I hope more people find this, and I hope you have lots of success.

Thanks a bunch! Yeah it's been a tad hard to get coverage so far, but it's only been out a few days so I hope it picks up soon. Thanks for your feedback, my comments inlined below:

The icon is branded "Rob-o-Bot", with a lowercase "o", but throughout the game and in the achievements, the "o" is capitalized. It doesn’t matter which way you do this, but you should probably be consistent.
Good catch!

During the rescue mission, when I hit the right shot, I’ll hear "one more time". But it's rarely ever just one more time that I need to hit this shot. Sometimes, it takes three or four shots to complete this mission. Something's off here.
I agree, unfortunately what she says is a bit misleading. You are supposed to hit a target a couple of times, and what she says doesn't really make any sense until you just have one to go. Unfortunately, Larissa, who's from the US, won't be back for probably about a year, so we cannot record a new one right now.

The 321 countdown is nice when returning from a pause, but it's unnecessary when the ball hasn't been fired into the playfield yet.
I agree, we'll see what we can do!

The pause menu is disabled during the ball lost points tally. I'd like to be able to get to the pause menu even during this part of the game. (Ahem.)
I agree, we'll see what we can do!

There's no indication at the end of the game when you've beaten your high score. There should be fanfare here to highlight this.
I agree, we'll see what we can do!

On a few occasions, I’ve had part of the audio drop out. I’m not sure what triggers this, and I can’t reliably reproduce this, but every once in a while, the voice samples will stop working. Everything else is fine, seemingly, but until I restart the game, I’m getting only some of the sounds.
Thanks, it's a known issue and will be fixed very soon. It happens if you let your device go to sleep (and possibly if you press the top button).

There should probably be a static camera view. I play mostly on the iPhone 5, where with the taller screen it doesn’t scroll as much, but on the iPad, the camera actually affects gameplay. Often, the view will be zoomed toward the top of the playfield, and you won't have enough time to adjust the lit lanes at the bottom of the screen. This makes it harder to re-activate your kickbacks when playing on the iPad.
I agree. We'll see what we can do! And you should try it on an iPad if you get the chance, it's so much more immersive! That goes for TPA as well

I really dig the DMD animation in your teaser trailer, setting up the story. I don't know if this would blow up your app's size, as a video, or if you could render it in-engine, but you should include it with the game somehow. It's very cool.
It will be included in the game, we actually forgot! Will add it later for sure.

Sometimes, the mission objectives are still a little confusing, especially at first. I think the lights could be tweaked a little to highlight a little better what you're supposed to be shooting for. Maybe there could be voice acting, too, to direct your shots.
Any particular mission? Or all of them?

Alternatively, or in addition, you could post a rule sheet somewhere, on your website or in the app. Ideally, there'd be step-by-step instructions, like how it's done in Pinball Arcade.
Yeah we will probably do this first in some form as it requires less work on our part.

It should be possible to play music from another app in the background, while playing the game. And if somebody is playing music from another app in the background, they should be able to choose whether or not they want to hear sound effects, perhaps even with a control to adjust the volume.
I agree, we'll see what we can do!

I tried cradling a ball for a while, to get a pinball status report. I was disappointed when this didn't work.
Yeah this is on our wish list as well.

Why are there separate leaderboards for the iPhone and iPad version?
They should be the same, I'll look into it.

You mentioned you'd like to make more tables. I’m looking forward to this. But if you do make more, it'd be great if you could somehow consolidate all of your tables into a single app. I’m not sure about everybody else here, but I’d much rather have everything all together, where I can get new tables with an in-app purchase. My pinball folder overfloweth.
I agree, that's the plan!

 

[Bride of Trolls]

Hey!

...

Anyway, like I said, I'm stoked to hear that you guys like it, and I'd really appreciate your feedback as you guys are our target audience (i.e. pinball lovers), so keep the feedback coming. Mind you this is our FIRST pinball game, hopefully the first of many.

It is a real nice pinball, but it doesn't work correct on iPad1 with IOS 4.3.

The DMD and all buttons are empty:





Redownload and reboot the device doesn't help.

 

[Anders]

Aw that sucks, so sorry about that. We're working on an bug-fix update and will submit it soon. We don't have an iPad 1 anymore (but I think it's 4.3 related) as we had a break-in and they stole a bunch of computers and iPads etc. Thanks for letting us know though, will fix as soon as possible!