[Greg Peshek]

Really, I think the most important game aspect is a game that allows for diversity in robot design. Sure this year you got some kind of different designs. Maybe a fan here and fan there. A shooter a dumper. When it all comes down to it, there were just a bunch of boxes on wheels. Example: I showed my mom, who has never paid attention to what we did, pictures of the field while in action. Her first reaction - well they all kind of look the same - like squares on wheels.

Sure there are intricate differences to every robot, but I think it makes the game boring when you have a lot of similarly shaped robots doing the exact same thing. This game came out to how you want to say the word tomatoes. I liked Rack N Roll and Overdrive from the perspective that you had totally different robots doing different things. Rack N Roll you had ramp bots, bots that could hang on the first tier only, defense bots, bots with giant arms, bots with forklifts, hybrids. It was fun and different with tons of different designs. Overdrive you had scissor lifts, shooters shooting 10lb balls, giant arms, and huge suction devices. What did we have this year - urethane belting and some PVC for the most part - the engineering challenge was more optimization than actual design, and I personally would rather have more of a design challenge than an optimization challenge.

I would much rather see creativity and fun, exciting designs... even if they don't work out that well - it's more fun in my opinion to see that at competitions than rolling fridges confined to a restrictive imaginary box.

-Greg