One Hour Reviews: Game #010: Gyromite, Released: October 18th, 1985

Developed by: Nintendo R&D 1, Published by: Nintendo

Introduction & Bias:

First, I want to do a little self congratulations for making it to my tenth review. I'm considering the first 17 reviews of the US launch titles to be a real proof of concept for the project so I would like to thank my readers for staying with me. A lot of my time has been taken up by the Zapper block and the Sports block but I have just one more gimmick peripheral to go through before I can go back to reviewing some one-off game ideas. So before I can get to games like Excitebike and Kung-Fu I will review the two games used with the Robotic Operating Buddy or R.O.B.

I jumped on the Nintendo bandwagon relatively late in the NES' lifespan so I did not get a first generation NES box set. To the best of my pre-research knowledge the R.O.B. was released at launch with the NES and was intended to have a large role in Nintendo's library for several years. For better or worse it was only used for two games, both of which were released with the US Nintendo launch. As such I never owned a physical R.O.B. but I am curious how much one might cost today. I intend to find out and report on the significance of the peripheral in the trivia sections of the next two reviews. For right now rest assured that I am going into these two games blind except for one very important source of information.

Yes, the Angry Video Game Nerd covered the R.O.B. in his episode 100 special. This gave me a lot of insight into how to play Gyromite in particular because nothing, nothing, in the game tells the user how to play. So much had to go into setting up the R.O.B. to play Gyromite that instructions in the manual must have been necessary. Well, here I am thirty years later and if I didn't have this video for guidance I would have been sunk. This is going to affect my first impressions of the game pretty dramatically.

First Impressions & Presentation:

Booting up the game made me a little nervous because on top of having no music playing at startup I was also treated to a pretty ugly looking title card that does not even have the right name!

Pictur... Not Pictured: Gyromite?

It seems that when Nintendo brought this game over they kept the original title card intact. The game was originally called Robot Gyro because the R.O.B. was simply called Robot in Japan and the game makes use of the spinning gyros that came with the unit. I also do not get any demonstrations of the game in action so I have to go ahead and wing it.

Pushing start gets me to the game option screen and I have a few selections to make.

Not Pictured: My recommendation to never select "TEST"

Test and Direct lets the player input controls which will send a signal to the R.O.B. to make sure it is receiving its commands correctly. The signals are sent out in an epileptic inspiring series of green flashes. I suppose that the frequency of the flashes tells the unit to do something different but I have no peripheral to test it on. Considering that the flashes happen at each input if the player starts mashing buttons on this screen it could really be painful to the eyes.

The two game modes are Game A and B. Game A has both a 1 player and 2 player mode but these are just alternating player modes rather than any sort of competitive or cooperative arrangement. Game B is a single player game that I will get into later. Selecting Game A actually took me longer than I expected. Out of habit I pressed the A button to get into the Game A mode and that does not grant me entry. Instead it cycles through the 40 stages programmed into the game. The B button cycles back through the numbers in the opposite direction so I was able to finally enter stage 1 via the start button. The first experience Game A gives me is a quick pan shot of the playing field which is roughly two or three screens wide. This gives me a good look at the problems I have to solve and implies what my goal is without telling me directly. The issue is that without a manual to reference I have no immediate idea as to what my character's capabilities are and button mashing does next to nothing to teach me anything.

Pictured: Dy-no-mite! ...in Gy-ro-mite!

I'm going to break down the control scheme and how I had to work around the lack of peripheral in the experience section. My first impressions section is going to be pretty short as gameplay wise there is little I could experience. Without doing some research I could make zero progress at the start of my play time so that is all going to be brought up later.

The graphics during gameplay actually are pretty decent. I am dealing with a plain black background but it is made up with colorful foreground objects such as the bright red and blue pistons that are an important gameplay feature, green enemies, grey stationary objects and a mostly white player avatar. Everything is quite clear graphics-wise and the black background actually helps everything that the player needs to interact with pop and that is quite helpful. On top of that the music track that loops is quite cheerful. I would describe it as industriously optimistic with its upbeat march tempo. It complements the implied science motif of the game and once I got the ball rolling on my gameplay experience it was actually a good addition to my experience. Of course I would have liked more than one theme in this game mode but I'll take what I can get. I honestly did not have that much time to get bored with the music considering what I needed to do to play the game normally.

Experience & Conveyance:

Hoo boy. This is where I needed some help. I think the best way to tackle this section is to describe just what the R.O.B. is supposed to do for the player and how that is hard to emulate. I am going to break down the R.O.B. in more detail in the trivia section but for now the unit's role is to pick up spinning tops, or gyros, and set them down on pads that are attached to levers. These levers would then push the A or B button on the second player's Nintendo controller. This function is activated by the first player pressing start to prep the TV for a command and then pressing directions or the A or B button to steer the R.O.B. to the correct location, pick up the gyro, and drop it on one of the action buttons. The movements of the unit are very slow and deliberate. The game itself is not very demanding in its time limit but there are enemies that must be avoided at all costs because the player can do very little to defend himself. It is very possible to die while waiting for the R.O.B. to execute its command. Now, for me as the chump playing this on his laptop what am I supposed to do?

Pictured: Death. My fault or the R.O.B.'s? You dec- yeah, it was totally my fault

It turns out that there is a pretty simple solution to my issue. At the end of the day the R.O.B. is just a stand in for a second player in a cooperative game. I just had to program my SNES style USB controller so that the direction pad and the start and select buttons all gave inputs to player 1 and then let the A and B button control to player 2. The Angry Video Game Nerd accomplished this by sawing apart two NES controllers and duct taping them back together to create a clumsy but functional Gyromite controller. I don't have that kind of money to burn and I'm not playing on a real TV anyway so I am satisfied with my solution. With all that out of the way let's finally dig into some real gameplay and conveyance!

Stage 1 is not a great ambassador for the rest of the game. After the quick pan shot to show the playing field I was finally given control. My first obstacle was a blue piston which blocked my progress. This lowered itself on its own as a sort of default function so I proceeded past it and made my way to a green vertical line. This turns out to be a climbing wire. What I did not know then but I quickly learned is that the climbing wire is one of only two ways to gain height in this game. My scientist avatar cannot jump at all. This makes sense seeing as how all of the controller functions are absorbed by movement and raising and lowering the blue and red pistons. While it does not make sense physically it at least provides some of the rules the player needs to complete each challenge. No jumping: check. This lack of jump button became problematic as I quickly fell into a small pit. The solution to my problem was to raise the blue piston I stood on to get me back to ground level but I was quickly defeated by the game's green bird-reptile-like enemy as it fell on top of me.

Pictured: Not Mario

My lead up to my first death did teach me a couple of things. First, I can't jump. Already covered. Second, I learned the movement behaviors of the enemies. The enemies can't jump either. They simply walk forward and will climb any rope they come across. They rarely, if ever, track the player. This allows the player to make some pretty deliberate decisions about how to proceed which is good considering how slowly the player can respond under normal circumstances. This encouraged me to use the pistons to evade the monsters, block monsters' progress, or even crush them between the piston and the floor or the ceiling. The only other method of defense are radishes which are sprinkled throughout the stages. The monsters will stop at any radish they come across and eat them for about ten to fifteen real life seconds which is more than enough time to walk past them. There is no indication the player can safely pass through one of the eating monsters but trial and error taught me that quickly enough.

The only other thing I could do with each stage was collect the bundles of dynamite. Since the fuses of the dynamite were lit and I had a time limit it was easy enough to assume that I was meant to collect/defuse all of them. Collecting all of the dynamite rewards the player with a "win" jingle and they are taken to the next stage without much ceremony. After I learned all of that I knew everything I needed. There are no new wrinkles introduced later in the stages, no new mechanics or anything. It is just 40 stages of raising and lowering pistons, evading enemies, and no jumping. As a challenge I decided to jump right to the last few levels to test out my skills and most of these final stages only required one or two tries to complete a piece.

Pictured: Sleepwalking to Game B victory

Satisfied with conquering Game A well within my hour allotment I moved to Game B and it is actually a bit of a different experience. Game B involves protecting the scientist avatar as he literally sleepwalks his way through different obstacle courses. The player needs to raise and lower pistons so that the scientist makes it from the left side of the stage to the right intact. While this is an interesting twist to the Gyromite formula it is actually pretty dull. The game designers knew that the R.O.B. had a long lead time to inputting commands. This means there is a pretty long wait at the beginning of most of the stages as the scientist lurches his way toward the first obstacle. There is no way that I found to speed up this process. On top of this the player is eventually tasked with selecting the correct path out of two or three choices. The first couple of times this happens there is a an arrow sign that tells the player which path is correct with enough lead time to steer the avatar over in that direction. Eventually the player just needs to flip a coin and guess which path is appropriate. The player only finds out that the wrong choice was selected the moment it is too late to do anything about it. The avatar is then promptly dumped in a pit to be eaten by a monster. Good Nintendo fun!

Verdict & Score:

Gyromite is an interesting beast. It was a game with a very specific function in mind and that function was to sell more NES consoles. To that end Gyromite probably shows the best use of the R.O.B. but also displays its limitations. These days I don't get to play Gyromite nor its sister game with a real peripheral and playing the game on one controller does take away some of the game's novelty and sense of timing. Still, once I got around the initial struggle of setting it up I found a fairly interesting puzzle game with a set of rules that are followed throughout. Game A gave me quite a bit of enjoyable puzzle solving game time and I will take that any day. With all that put together I will award Gyromite a 5/10. I think there are some great ideas but I think more could have been done with the concept had it not been limited to what a player could reasonably accomplished with the R.O.B.

Factoids & Trivia:

The R.O.B. is an interesting toy. In fact, that's what Nintendo was betting on with the release of the R.O.B., or just Robot in Japan. See, just a couple of years prior to the NES release an event known as The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 occurred. To summarize the Crash, dozens of toy makers wanted in on the video game craze and the market, especially in the United States, became too saturated. A few colossal marketing and production errors later and many game console makers and software providers went bust and retailers were stuck with product they couldn't move. After that, home consoles were a poison pill and retailers did not want to sell much of any product that even looked like a video game.

The Family Computer was taking off in Japan and Nintendo needed to get into the American market so they came up with a ploy to get the NES into homes. They sold the R.O.B. as the primary product with the NES as the add-on. The cute robot toy was simply a way for the kids at home to enjoy a video game. Apparently this was good enough for as many retailers as Nintendo needed and the R.O.B. came boxed with the console and Gyromite while Duck Hunt and the Zapper was the other big Nintendo bundle. While the Zapper came out ahead as having more appeal in the long run, helped by the fact that more than two games in the NES library support the Zapper, the R.O.B. ended up being just what Nintendo needed to penetrate the US market like a Trojan Horse with big, googly eyes.

But why was the R.O.B. retired so quickly while the Zapper had staying power? Well for one, it's a lot easier to make a game where the player is required to shoot things than it is to create a game to make use of a very highly specialized toy. The R.O.B. is a pretty clumsy contraption. The device itself has a hexagon base where different extensions can be attached. In the case of Gyromite the R.O.B. is fitted with two gyro stands on the right side of the base, the blue and red button pads (to correspond with the blue and red pistons in the game) in the front and front-left, and the gyro spinner on the back left. The R.O.B. can move its clawed arms to any of those five positions and also has three height settings so the gyros can be passed over each other. Green flashes on the TV instruct the R.O.B. to move left, right, up, down, or open and close its arms. The head of the R.O.B. never moves so it can maintain eye contact with the TV. And your soul...

Problems arise when the gyros run out of steam and fall off of the button pads while the player is attempting to keep certain pistons closed. The accessory itself moves very deliberately to each of its positions which makes it hard to make and execute quick decisions. Trying to solve a relatively fast paced puzzle such as a Gyromite stage boggles my mind. The toy is also quite loud as servos grind away to get the R.O.B. to move at all. It makes me wonder if this was enjoyable in a family room situation due to the noise. Still, if Nintendo was just trying to make video games approachable again they succeeded. The rest, certainly, is history.

For a video of the R.O.B. in motion, please check out the YouTube link below. If you want to buy a R.O.B. with all of its attachments, feel free to shell out about $100 on eBay. If you want to buy Gyromite you will only be out $5 to $40 depending on whether or not you want it boxed. If you want to read more about R.O.B. continue reading my next review as I attempt to get an hour's worth of entertainment out of the only other R.O.B. game that Nintendo released: Stack Up.

Sources:

NES box art:

http://www.thecoverproject.net/

R.O.B. in gyro action!