As seen in: Mega Man 3 (NES)
Also in: Mega Man 8 (Saturn/PlayStation)
Distinguishing feature: Robot dog; actually quite useful.
Strengths: The Swiss-army knife of dogs.
Weaknesses: Has the intelligence of a real dog.
Profile by Andrew Bentley | February 13, 2010
There are certain questions in this world that don’t have easy answers: The meaning of life; why is it still called "happy hour" when it lasts from 2 to 5; and what do you get when you combine everything but the kitchen sink with man’s best friend? The traditional answers to these questions are vague, riddled with philosophical meanderings and business doublespeak that do little to actually answer these questions in any meaningful way. Unless, of course, your name is Thomas Light and you have a doctorate in robotics, along with a penchant for making increasingly improbable robots for concrete solutions to everyday problems. Having met Barman myself [1], and since Dr. Light made Rush, the mechanical version of a Swiss-Army Knife crossed with a doberman pinscher, he’s already answered two of those three questions. And I hear he’s hard at work answering the first one. Something to do with the Greek alphabet and math from what I understand, although I don’t see how that relates to robots at all.
Anyway, Rush, as the red robo-dog is named, is pretty much the ultimate companion to the world’s ultimate handyman. Which is understandable, no offense to Dr. Light at all here, considering that said handyman’s skillset consists of running, jumping and shooting at things with the cannon he had swapped out for his arm. Now, if you were gonna build the world’s ultimate champion of humanity in the form of nuclear reactors and metal, wouldn’t you at least give the schmuck a jetpack or some powered-exoskeletal armor to toy around in? I mean, the blue bomber had to save the world twice before Light got it into his head that hey, maybe just teaching the poor guy to slide wasn’t the best way to counter ol’ Wily’s schemes. So what does he do? He makes the one robot that’s actually useful between him and Wily’s combined designs [2] and gives it the brain of a dog. A dog! It makes you wonder if he’s just as crazy as Wily is sometimes. Heck, the dog-bot has a metal-detecting nose, a back-mounted spring coil and can turn into a submarine and some sort of dog-plane. You’d think it’d be him saving the world, not his master.
Wait, what’s that you’re saying? Happy hour’s over? It’s only 4:58, you hunk of circuits and girly drinks! Bah, robots. You’d think it’d kill someone to make one with an actual brain inside its head, or something.
[1] A swell fella, as far as fellas made out of steel and titanium go anyway. I really wish I knew how he made all of his mixed drinks glow though -- that was quite a trick.
[2] Well, excluding Miss Roll from that anyway. She’s nice, if a bit quick to resort to broom-related and vacuum related violence.
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