[AmyPrib]

Hands down.... 2004.

I have watched video from every year of FIRST, I have seen all the games. Didn't experience all of them, but have watched them. Very edge of your seat type of action, with the 2x capping, or the hanging on the bar, or shooting those balls into the goal at the buzzer... whooo!

The amount of diversity in robot design and strategy was simply amazing. Your robot could do EVERYthing, or it could do ONE thing extremely well, and you were STILL a top contender. I think that would definitely be an interesting game these days with 3v3. With 3 main tasks, you could have a robot alliance each with a unique functionality.

The automode was good - not too weak, not too overbearing. I don't recall much of a trend of winning automode leading to winning the match, or vice versa. There was a choice of things to do, terrain variety (small/big steps), so many different designs for manipulating 2x or small balls, as well as different designs for hanging..... And the all-in-one robots were just awesome.

Oh yeah, and it was pretty specatator friendly, and pretty visual as to who was winning.

The only drawback was the amount of human player interaction. Many people thought it was too much - and it may have been just a bit too much. But, it was insanely exciting to watch, on video and in person. So to go from that to 2005 where there was essentially one task, and lack of robot diversity was sorta disappointing..

Anywho.. 2004..