[Lil' Lavery]

Following up on my earlier comment and responses.

2005 was a lot of fun for a number of reasons. There wasn't a lot of variety in robots, which hurt it (started the trend of more and more robots looking and being the same). But most robots could score, even if they weren't good at it. And every scored tetra definitely mattered, a lot. A single well placed tetra could swing the final score of the match by as much as 43 points. It was easy to follow for the fans, and everyone in the audience could build a definite appreciation for the strategy involved. The penalties kinda sucked, but they were easy to avoid and most teams learned their lessons about them early on.

2007 had the most interesting and dynamic blend of offense and defense I think we've ever seen in a FIRST game. You needed strong defense in order to be a good offensive team. Unlike 2005, where you could cap over an existing tetra, you only had one shot to grab each spider leg. It made speed, strategy, and execution critical. I admit, at some of the lower levels of competition it could be boring (but that's true for almost any game), but when played right (see Galileo and IRI for example), it was incredible. The amount of interaction and strategy required for an alliance to excel was awesome.

2008 was one of the most boring games, imo. While I personally think G22 was easy to avoid and there was no reason for that many penalties, there were tons of them. They even flipped the outcome of matches on Einstein. There wasn't much variety in bots, and many matches were over even before they began with HUGE hybrid leads for one alliance. At the highest levels it was fast paced and somewhat interesting, but the strategy was minimal and most alliances played the game more or less the same way, and the matches that involved ball pinning were incredibly boring. By the end of the season most successful alliances simply used two hurdlers and a third bot capable of getting laps and annoying the crap out of the other team by moving their ball around.

Granted, I'm not saying 2005 or 2007 are the best games. I still think that honor belongs to 2004 (truly fun game with some of the most fun robots I've ever seen). But I like them a lot more than the glorified race that 2008 was (also note, I voted for 1998 this time. Any game where a placebo wins a match... ).