Best 4 Year Game Career?

[Kevin Leonard]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

I don't see how you can argue that 2011-2014 was diverse when the first two words used to describe 2012, 2013, and 2014 were all "shooting game." 2012 and 2013, in particular, were astoundingly similar for games played in back-to-back years. Both years also severely lacked design diversity compared to most other games. Sure you can point out exceptions in each game, but every game has a handful of exceptions.

That's not to say I don't like 2012 or 2013 as games. They're two of my all time favorites. But the diversity argument during that timeframe is completely bunk.

2013 had all sorts of successful robots. When discussing 2012 or 2011, for example, you come up with what was essentially the best design, but not in 2013. In 2013, there were cyclers and floor pickups and full court shooters and climbers and very few of these robots looked the same.

Take a whole bunch of floor pickup robots and compare them- very few were similar in design aside from the fact that they probably had a flywheel shooter and roller collector. But those flywheel shooters might have been 1 wheel with a curved wall, 2 or 3 wheels with a flat wall, those collectors might have had top rollers with a tray to pull the discs onto or top and bottom rollers. Their release points and shooting locations were often different too.

Cyclers and Full court shooters were generally more homogenous, but often still different (were they tall or short, how did they shoot, what was their drivetrain)

Robots with climbs were crazier still.

I don't think the idea that 2013 lacked design diversity holds water whatsoever.

2011 and 2012 had many homogenous robot designs, but 2014 also had a lot of different designs.

2014 had roller collector captaults and Simbot SS's, sure, but the exact design details of each were still often way different. 20's roller collector captault was totally different than 469's or 340's, and 1114's Simbot SS was totally different than 971's or 2791's.

As while they were all shooting games, the style of shooting was remarkably different each year. 2012 required a lot of backspin on the balls and the ability to account for differences in density, 2013 was a totally different game piece that required unique systems to deliver the game piece to the shooter, and 2014 had giant balls that required giant mechanisms, and you only needed to ever hold one ball at a time.

TLDR: 2011-2014 absolutely had diverse robot design and variance in game design.
/endrant