[Jared Russell]

I gotta say that at Kickoff I was NOT impressed with this year's challenge. It's 2005 over again, I thought...

Well, it's no Aim High, but it's grown on me. Still, there were a lot of things that FIRST could have (and should have) known were going to happen that they should have rectified.

1. Autonomous is not a big part of the game. Yes, it's cool if you can do it, and potentially that keeper doubles your row, but the challenge was rather tough (rotating and translating the rack?!), leaving younger teams (and veteran teams who didn't have the time) in the dirt. And that one tube seldom decided the match. I'm of the opinion that only autonomous mode is truly robotics - make it have a big impact (and allow for dead reckoning to some extent)!

2. Too much action in the middle of the field. I liked Aim High and Triple Play because robots were constantly all over the place. Perhaps another place to score other than right in the center?

3. PENALTIES! No one likes it when matches are decided by penalties. The yellow/red card fiasco was luckily judiciously used, but even so too many matches were left to the refs. Penalties should be for SAFETY and for COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES. Things like making a fallen robot violate the 72" rule can suck all the fun out of a match, and it adds insult to injury.

All the same, once teams got better and the scores got higher, the penalties became less of an issue.

But still - I just didn't get that visceral feeling of excitement from hanging innertubes that I got from shooting things. Or lifting way bigger and heavier things. Or doing a robot chin up. Or blasting through a wall of crates. Etc.

FIRST gets a 6/10 from me.