User blog:Drop Zone mk2/My Least Favourite Robot

I was planning to write a “Top 10 Least Favourite Robots” list, but the more I thought about it, there aren’t really many robots I truly hate, and whilst there are many robots I dislike, I felt I would just be beating a dead horse to go on about them again. Do I need to go on about Juggernot 2, Monad, Dr Fist, Spin Doctor or Cobra again? So much has been said about these robots that I don’t want it to seem like I’m just jumping on the bandwagon. (Not that the complaints about these robots are unfair in any way.) Then, I realized that really, there is only one robot I truly hate, and unlike the aforementioned robots, it seems to have avoided much criticism, hence this blog.

What is the robot you may ask? Mighty Mouse!

Why is that, I hear you cry? Well, simply put, the main reason I hate this robot is that its only “tactic” was to run away from its opponents.

Think that’s an exaggeration? Well just read these quotes from its article; “it survived its first round after doing absolutely nothing”, “Mighty Mouse ran away from Dantomkia”, “Mighty Mouse tried to escape the two opponents”, “it made little impact as it stayed out of the way of the main action”, “Mighty Mouse again took evasive action as it tried to dodge Kronic the Wedgehog”, “running all over the arena, making no actual attempt to attack Thermidor 2”. That’s one quote from EACH of its battles, not just from one fight.

Yet despite this, it actually managed to “win” battles, either by hiding in the background and relying on stronger robots to take out the opposition (Specifically Chaos 2 and Thermidor 2), or with one lucky hit. Kronic flipped them over and over, but Mighty Mouse’s one hit luckily knocked them out. Apart from that, the only time I remember it making an attack was one time it bumped into Mobot, though that was probably an accident whilst trying to dodge Thermidor. The robots I mentioned in the first paragraph may have been bad robots, but at least they didn’t fluke their way through battles like this, they lost where they deserved to. Not to mention, even they showed a little bit of aggression.

Worse still, Mighty Mouse’s excessive evasion tactics saw it progress at the expense of better robots, such as Iron Awe, the powerful flipper of Kronic, the fast and manoeuvrable 8645T 2 with its good flipper, and the intriguingly designed and unique looking Mobot. Any one of those robots would have given us more entertaining battles, as they would have actually given us battles!

Especially annoying was the fact it “reached” the Heat Final of Series 7. The four way melees in Series 6 and 7 brought a lot of good action, but the problem with them is that many weaker robots survived the melees by hiding in the background whilst the most dominant robot took out the other robots, and nowhere is that better evidenced than with Mighty Mouse. In Series 7, so many good robots fell at the first hurdle; Supernova, Disc-O Inferno, Barbaric Response, Hydra, Kan Opener and Twister to name a few, yet Mighty Mouse actually reached the Heat Final! Need I say more?

Mighty Mouse shouldn’t have even been in Series 7. Yes, I know it was only selected as a reserve, but couldn’t they have included a robot that showed a little bit of aggression, like Direct Action or Pressure? As for fulfilling the “Active Weapons” rule, they slapped on the spinning discs on the back, but they never used them and it was so obvious they had no intention of using them.

Not only was Mighty Mouse in no way aggressive, it seemed almost designed for running away, being really fast, able to roll over, and having car steering. That’s really the only “praise” I can give this joke of a machine, that it was “good” at running away from its opponents. It’s as if the team were so concerned with defence, they forgot that the whole point of the show is to destroy your opponents. You’d think that they would have learned after entering Velocirippa, one of the worst robots in the show’s history. Instead, they built an almost identical robot, except more reliable.

Building a poorly designed, frailly built or completely robot is bad enough, but for a robot to not even try to fight its opponents, and to actually seem especially designed for running away is even worse. Inexcusable.

The slideshow on the left is a list of "dishonorable mentions", robots that are bad, but I don't dislike enough to name my least favourite.

The slideshow on the right is just a load of randomly selected robots, for no reason other than to act as red herrings on the Recent Wiki Activity page