Favorite FIRST Game

[Richard Wallace]

I voted Hexagon Havoc for sentimental reasons. That was the game my rookie year. It was an important year for several reasons:

1) Although my first team (the Arch Rivals) only lasted through 1997, several other 1996 rookies have gone on to become FIRST legends. One of my favorite '96 rookies was the Baxter Bomb Squad. Their pit was right next to ours, out in that sweltering hot tent in the Epcot parking lot. Another favorite '96 rookie was the Beatty Beast -- they got off to a fast start in FIRST by seeding #1 in their rookie year, and of course the rest is history.

2) As mentioned earlier, the human players made their debut in 1996.

3) Alliance-forming, although not officially sanctioned, first appeared in 1996 as an attempt to stop powerful robots. It was neither universally applauded nor reviled, and the differing viewpoints persist to this day.

4) Capping also made its first appearance. There was no bonus for capping the goal with one of the 30 inch balls, but capping effectively closed the goal to further scoring and was widely applauded as a crowd-pleasing cool play.

5) There weren't as many rules, and this left the door open to some creative play tactics -- as described in the earlier post. My own team's creative tactic was to deposit a part of our robot in the lower section of the goal, thereby making some goal space inaccessible to other teams. We had a special ball depositing mechanism that allowed us to access the blocked area.

[Tim Baird]

Originally Posted by Jeff Waegelin

2000, for sure. I only saw one off-season event that year, but that game was amazing. It had fairly simple scoring, it was pretty well balanced, exciting to watch, and had a great "finishing move" with the original hanging bar. All together, it made for a great game to watch, and a great game to play.

I agree whole-heartedly. Aside from my obvious personal attachment to that year, I loved that game because of its simplicity. 2v2, balls all over the place, and the constant stealing/restealing of the black balls added a whole other dimension to the game. I also loved that it was easy (atleast from the drivers' station) to see the current score. It made predicting the outcome simpler and allowed for teams to better coordinate the final score so as to help the loser but to also boost the QPs (that year you received 3 times the losers score).

[aallen88]

Originally Posted by Freddy Schurr

Raising the Bar was the best game by far . Old school: 2 Robots on the field competing and many possibilities to win a match

I agree--there were a lot of different ways of scoring, so there were a lot of completely different designed robots.

Woahhhh I just realized it used to be only 2 v 2. I can't believe I completely forgot about that. That scares me a bit...

[ChuckDickerson]

Raising the Bar

Lots of different options to score and didn't need a real time scoring system like this year.

[the_short1]

triple play all the way. I loved the tic tac toe style game, where it really matered to defend your home/middle row against line theifs, it also had lots of posibilities for manuvering a tetra.. i loved it.

[GoSparx]

Originally Posted by Hachiban VIII

What has been your favorite FIRST game?
Which game did you think was...

>Most fun to watch
>Most fun to play/operate
>Had the best autonomous mode
>Sufficiently challenging (not unfair to rookie teams)
>Had the best challenge (pushing boxes, shooting balls)
>Generated a wide variety of diverse designs

I don't want to know what game your team did best at, I'm just curious to know which game was everyones favorite.


I've seen four years of FIRST games (Stack Attack, Raising the Bar, Triple Play, Aim High), all of which were good, but some were definitely better than others. My personal favorites have been Stack Attack and Aim High, both of which were exiting to watch and offered large open playing fields, allowing robots to zoom about unobstructed.

Also, what made that game great? Why did you like it.

By far, FIRST Frenzy: Raising the Bar was the best. You got to see totally different robots and the best part is, you got to see totally different robots that could all win. Usually this year, if you couldnt score the the center goal, you werent going to win. In Raising the Bar, you saw tons of different robots. Ball herders, ball dumpers, climbers, hangers of all different sorts, moveable goal grabbers etc. It was a great and fun game to watch.

[Jon K.]

My favorites are 2000 Co-Opertition FIRST (I wasn't on a team, and I was amazed by the robots, I was a dissalusioned 7th grader going to my first FIRST competition and fell in love.)

2002, it was a fun game, a lot of great robots were involved in the game that year, and traction was crazy. Plus it was one of the easier games to explain...

2005, it was just a unique challenge

2006, Again another unique challenge and it put most teams on a semi level playing field making for an interesting year.

[George A.]

I love the 2002 game...it was simplicity and complicated all at the same time. Easy to tell who was winning.

2001 was neat because I love seeing a high score...and an allaince getting a score of 700 something was pretty much as high as you can get w/o it being a glitch.

2003 & 2004 hold a special place in my heart because in 2003 I had the same design as 111 (who won the CHampionships...great minds think alike) and in 2004 my team won our first regional.

But overall I have to say 2002...HP could score balls, robots could score balls...tethers into end zone (Go Mini-MORT) and then you have the tug of wars for the goals....so exciting to watch.

[spears312]

I think Raising the Bar was probably the best game I have seen first hand. That was my freshmen year and the high level of diversity in the robots that year due to all the different ways to score has really been unparalleled the last two years.

[Bongle]

It may just be because I've seen 3 competitions worth and really gotten familiar with the game, but Aim High is pretty awesome. The real time scoring was really only screwed up in about 3% of matches that I saw.

Could anyone that remembers games earlier than 2003 please create wikipedia pages about them? I've been trying to get all the old games into wikipedia, but since I've only been around since 2003, I don't know tactics for any game earlier than that. I also don't have pictures for them.

Edit: If you don't want to update wikipedia, please email me some pictures of games in progress at artartartartort@hotmail.com

[Mark Pierce]

There are things I liked and disliked about each game, so it's hard to pick one. Here's my decision chart, in order by category (kind of):

>Most fun to watch -Triple Play, Co-opertition, Aim High, Zone Zeal
>Most fun to play/operate - Triple Play, Double Trouble, Diabolical Dynamics
>Had the best autonomous mode -Aim High, First Frenzy
>Sufficiently challenging - Double Trouble, Aim High, Stack Attack, Zone Zeal
>Had the best challenge - Double Trouble, Aim High, Triple Play, Diabolical Dynamics
>Generated a wide variety of diverse designs - Co-opertition, Double Trouble, First Frenzy, Diabolical Dynamics

Note that these are all since I started. I saw a little of three earlier games as a spectator, but can't really judge them. I voted for 1999, although not as spectator friendly, it had a lot of cool features on a small field. From an engineering and drivers standpoint it was great, from a scorers and audience level, not as good. With all those who haven't seen it, I figured it deserved the vote.

[pyroslev]

Raising the Bar has to be my favorite. The task were so numerous and diversified (a combination year as I put it when I'm talking to others) that Super Robots were hard to find. Aim High was the second on my list due to the complexity and lack of friendliness to the uninformed. (I had to explain it so many times.)

[dk5sm5luigi]

Toroid Terror was my favorite year. Having to find a way to manipulate a tube and change its orientation to score was very interesting. Also having to pick out the proper color to score. I personally liked all the games when the scoring objects were Red, White, or Blue based on which station you had. It made the field have a look that you don't see anymore. Also 1997 was the second year of Rumble at the Rock and that competition was just awesome.

For those interested in seeing the rules from old games you can go to http://www.first-a-holics.com/competitions/

[techtiger1]

2004 raising the bar gets my vote for my favorite game. I like the playing field, the different robots, ball grabbers, hangers and the many different mechanisms teams used. I think that none of the other games compare 2003 was who could built the best drive train and that was about it, 05 well 05 was way too easy. Finally, 2006 was the opposite of 05 too many things going on, maybe a bit too relent on technology, and just very complex. Just my opinion on the subject, I think that the game design committee does a great job every year I was just voicing my opinion on some things.

my two and a half cents,
Drew

[Ian Mackenzie]

1999 by far - there's never been anything quite like the puck. The Chief Delphi vs. Wildstang swerve drive puck tug-of-war at Great Lakes is still one of my favourite matches ever...

Aim High was good, but I think it was a little too simple - there needed to be one more thing to do (like a goal to drag around the field or something). I think two main game tasks is about right; 2004 had too many (still lots of fun, though), and 2005 and 2006 had too few. 2002 would have been fantastic if the balls had been worth 2 points each instead of 1; as it was, picking up balls wasn't all that effective. (Before anybody jumps on me, yes, the very final match at the championship was decided on balls, but that was the exception instead of the rule.)