[Ian Curtis]

It seems to me that Logomotion is really two games masquerading itself as one. There is the tube placing game, and the race. Winning either of them is good enough to get you playing on Saturday afternoon... but you need to win at both of them to make it out of the quarterfinals.

It's extremely difficult to place enough tubes to guarantee that a minibot (or worse, two minibots) won't flip the winner. If you can't place tubes, it's hard to play effective defense without getting penalties/DQs, even if they are accidental.

Watching WPI, I did see some great defense in the middle of the field. Far and away the most entertaining defensive play I've seen in quite some time, because there wasn't any of that ramming while scoring business. It was all about heading robots off at the pass and juking and jiving to make it to the rack.

However, most of the defense near the yellow line was a lot more painful to watch. Having been on the wrong end of the 2005 human loading penalty, I would want anything to do with a robot on the rack side of the yellow lines.

Also, it seemed like many teams weren't really aware enough of the lanes. Often times tubes would get shoved in the lanes or a team would drop a tube while attempting to place it. They would then run after it, seemingly without realizing they had just got themselves a lane infraction penalty.