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Transbot Developer: Sega? Based on: Every side-scrolling shooter ever created, with all their vitality drained by those vampires from Ghost House. |
Oh good. Another My Card game.
Today's unfortunate SMS card selection was "TransBot." Sadly, though, the transbot in question wasn't the one from Futurama.
Because a game about a saucy transgender robot with a Puerto Rican accent would have ruled so hard. And you know, it's not like Sega was all uptight about censorship the way Nintendo was. They probably could have published it in America, even.
Anyway, TransBot's name is fairly mundane in origin: the title character is a transforming robot. It's almost as literal as the box art... except not in the same charming way.
And even the box art isn't as special for this one. This is one of those cases where the U.S. got the shaft again on the packaging. Yeah, the senselessly literal card box is still charming, but I like the flimsy photocopied look of the Brazilian version. Actually, that may be the manual, but even so: TecToy saw fit to rename a game about a transforming robot "Nuclear Creature."
Brazil is so rad.
TransBot, however, isn't rad. I would consider it more "eh" than anything else. It's an 8-bit side-scrolling shooter that plays out like about a billion other 8-bit shooters. You know how shooter fans wax poetic over the wonders of Saturn and Genesis and TG16 shooters? But you never hear them go on about how great 8-bit shooters were? Yeah, there's a reason for that. With a very few notable exceptions, shoot-em-ups were pretty lousy on 8-bit systems. Not usually bad, per se, just kinda... unremarkable. Generic sci-fi landscapes scrolled past, generic things flew around in formation and shot tiny bullets at you, and you generally used some sort of bland, underwhelming power-up system to try and give yourself a fighting chance.
The good news, if indeed you consider that particular game archetype "good," is that TransBot doesn't do much to stray from the formula. As a matter of fact, it clings to the formula like a baby lab monkey clutching a carpet-covered fake mother.
The selling point of practically every shooter is its gimmicky power-up system, and in this case Sega went so far as to name the entire game after the gimmick. TransBot, you see, transforms -- from a space ship into a robot! Unfortunately there wasn't much in the way of positive precedent for that particular hook among 8-bit shooters, the closest comparison being Macross for Famicom. If nothing else, TransBot is better than that steaming pile of shame, but not by too much.
The biggest problem is that the transformation system was frustratingly erratic -- to power-up, you had to shoot a little van that drove past on the ground every so often. It was a little like Spy Hunter, where you drove into those trucks to get an oil slick or whatever, but almost wholly random. Once you had your power-up, an alphanumeric roulette ran at the top of the screen and whichever letter you happened to pick in the heat of battle determined the final result of your new weapon. (There was something like a 2-in-6 chance that you would, in fact, transform, and thus fulfill the promise of the title.) It was almost maybe a little like Gradius would be if instead of accumulating Option capsules you were randomly assigned upgrades. Oh, and if Gradius' upgrades only lasted about 20 shots before the Vic Viper reverted back to its crappy initial version.
It guess it was a decent enough try, and it's at least more fun than MagMax or, say, Transformers. But TransBot serves as a strong reminder of just how wide the gulf between arcade and home shooters actually was in the mid-80s. For genre fans desperate to get their hands on a good console shoot-em-up, TransBot must have felt crawling to an oasis in the desert and finding a cup of pork drippings waiting there instead of water. It would keep you alive... just not very pleasantly.
Rating: Two pork drippings (of five)