MindRover

I've been using trygames.com for awhile now to find cheap games to play on my low end PC. The first one I tried, Medieval Conquest, is a quirky RPG strategy game. I downloaded the free time-limited demo and enjoyed it enough to buy the full version. With trygames.com, it's all done online, the upgrade is instantaneous. They don't have bleeding edge games like Half-Life 2 but that works out fine since I don't have a bleeding edge computer to run it on.

Last night I found a game called Mind Rover: The Europa Project by Cognitoy. It's an old game, from 1999, but it's unique in it's interface and style of play. The scenario is that you are a bored scientist on Europa with enough free time to program the mission robots for races, battles, and other types of play. You don't actually drive the robot around and tell it when to shoot, you program them to do those things based on certain inputs from sensors. The robot creation is a lot like configuring a mech in the MechWarrior games, except once you've fitted the equipment, you can hook it all together using boolean operators and wires, then set the inputs and reactions. Another cool thing about the game is that each robot runs its own virtual computer. This means that the Cognitoy gurus can externalize/distribute the "programs" to other machines, including real world physical robots. They've done that for some of the more common robot kits out there like the LEGO mindstorms.

I didn't get a chance to play the battle scenario yet but even the simpler scenarios were a lot of fun. Like the race. I would race the robot, see it act a certain way, go back and adjust the sensor to increase its range or decrease its spread and race again. You could spend hours configuring and refining your bots. I think I'll be doing more of that tonight. The only downside is it doesn't appear to be multiplayer over the lan. You can play other people's bots against your own though.