I'm not sure what's worse: Robot Wars dying, or the fact that the last Robot Wars episode ever was World Series: Episode 2.
If anyone is looking for something to fill the void that Robot Wars has left, then don't worry! There's plenty of shows coming along!
King of Bots just completed its first series in China and features lots of British builders including John Reid (Terrorhurtz) and Gabe (Sabertooth) competing with their new flipper
Tanshe. Ellis Ware (Pulsar/Magnetar) competing with
Great White, Gary Cairns (PP3D/Typhoon) with the insane
Crossfire and The Coopers (They built the house robots) competing with
Spectre which is now my favourite robot ever.
It was a fantastic series and it's all available on Youtube for free. You can watch episode one here. Someone has even done English translations of each episode, although I followed along nicely just watching in Chinese.
Team Rapid have said they are gearing up for KoB 2.
This Is Fighting (Sometimes referred to as King of Bots 1.5) is currently filming in China and features more very good robots. This should air later this year and if the pictures of the
arena and the
pits are anything to go by, it should be very good indeed. According to
Robotic Death Company, it's a mix between a normal tournament and The Voice where 4 captains choose teams of robots.
Clash Bots is currently filming in China and from what i've heard from builders involved, it's a mess and the production crew are slave drivers. But it's still worth looking out for. They've released lots of teasers/trailers and all of them are so bad they're hilarious.
BATTLEBOTS IS BACK! Discovery Science picked it up after ABC left it on their doorstep when it was just a baby. They have commissioned a 20 episode series with a
more intense format where every robot fights 3/4 times before the top robots move to a 16 bot bracket. Filming starts in a few weeks time and again, lots of British builders are going along too, including one of my friends. Support
Team Vanquish if you watch it.
And finally, there are plenty of
live shows happening in Britain that you can attend.
Robots Live and
Extreme Robots are running shows all over the country with some robots from Robot Wars and some that only do the live tour. One of the arenas has been upgraded to house spinners so fights should be just as destructive as the ones on the telly. I would say if you're looking for robot combat then definitely think about going along.
Jenuall wrote:Yeah I think they had the right idea to try and mix things up a bit, but getting the robots to fight over and over again could be somewhat anticlimactic.
I don't know whether they should have adjusted the rules somewhat to try and promote more varied robot designs because it did get a bit repetitive once people decided that spinners and flippers were basically the only way to go.
In the last series, they did try and change the rules up a bit with the allowance of limited entanglement devices to try and counter the spinners. They didn't really work that well, however. A meta always emerges in any competition, and in Robot Wars it happens to be armoured flippers and high KE spinners.
People build these robots with their own money. The appearance fee from Robot Wars is generally pittance compared to the cost of the actual robot (~£500). Why would I spend thousands of pounds of my own money on a design that will get wrecked by Aftershock in the first round, when I could make a high KE spinner for cheaper that would do better? The new Chinese shows (KOB, Clash Bots, This is Fighting) and Battlebots throw decent money at the competitors and it shows in the variety of designs that you get.
The biggest problem the reboot had, for me, was the BBC's stupid commitment to 6 episode series, which meant that they couldn't get as many robots in and the format had to change to really work.
I'll post here what I said on Facebook:
I feel people overestimate how many people watched the reboot of Robot Wars. It's not like they just shot Have I Got News For You in the back of the head or anything. At most, it was getting 1.3 million in the final series and barely making a dent in iPlayer.
While I didn't like the BBC's lack of marketing, I can understand why they would focus more on marketing other shows. Very few shows have quite the community that Robot Wars does and, for lack of a better term, it could market itself. They knew that a million people would tune in regardless when it was on. I would argue that Robot Wars did better against Blue Planet than most other shows they would consider putting against it.