User:ToastUltimatum/Lists

I think it's fair to say I have a lot of opinions regarding Robot Wars. Let's share them.

Top 20 Robots
Honourable mentions: Blue, Chopper, Crazy Coupe 88, DisConstructor, General Chompsalot, ICU, Ninjitsu, Philipper II, Probophobia, Ripper, Robochicken, Trazmaniac

Top 25 Battles
The lower half of the list is a bit shaky, it's not necessarily accurate, but I'm confident in my Top 10.

''NOTE: I may or may not have consciously left this as a Top 18 as opposed to a Top 20 for the time being. There may or may not be a reason.''

Honourable mentions:
 * √3 vs Pika III
 * Androne 4000 vs Tauron
 * Atomic vs S.M.I.D.S.Y. vs Cygnus X-1 vs Terror Turtle
 * Atomic vs S.M.I.D.S.Y.
 * Behemoth vs Apollo
 * Bigger Brother vs Hypno-Disc
 * Black Hole vs Tsunami
 * Chaos 2 vs Wild Thing
 * Chompalot vs Pussycat
 * Cyclone 2 vs Brute vs Revenge vs The Termite vs Hyperactive
 * Dantomkia vs Chaos 2
 * Eruption vs Behemoth
 * Eruption vs Carbide (Series 10 Final) - Will be a proper entry on the list when I take the time
 * Eruption vs PP3D (Series 9)
 * General Carnage 2 vs Guzunderbot
 * General Chompsalot vs Stinger
 * Gravity vs 13Black
 * Gravity vs Dantomkia
 * Gravity vs Lightning
 * Ironside3 vs Chompalot vs Pulsar vs Thermidor II
 * M2 vs Pussycat
 * Mute vs Behemoth
 * Mute vs Mr Nasty
 * Ninjitsu vs Buzz
 * Ninjitsu vs Destructive Criticism
 * Pussycat vs Hypno-Disc
 * Raging Knightmare vs Spawn Again
 * S3 vs Shredder - This would be the next to join the list if I expand it
 * S3 vs Shredder vs Armadrillo vs Roobarb
 * Scrap-II-Saur vs Meshuggah
 * Storm II vs Mute
 * Storm II vs The Steel Avenger
 * Storm II vs Tornado vs Ansgar 3
 * Thermidor II vs Dreadnaut XP-1
 * Thermidor II vs Stinger vs Behemoth
 * Tsumami vs X-Terminator vs Diabolus vs Major Tom 3
 * X-Terminator vs Killer Carrot 2

Top 10 Biggest Letdowns in Robot Wars
I shall clarify that this list is partially based upon my Top 10 favourite robots, and other users may not care as much as I did about these events.

Robots that could have beaten Storm II
NOTE: This was written in the context of 2004, not 2016.

Storm II is a robot that is considered by many to essentially be invincible. In fantasy wars, it usually ends up as the winner, and other users on this Wiki find it boring, not because of Mentorn's reasons, but because they too find Storm II to be invincible. Personally I like it quite a bit, but the invincibility deal is hard to deny. Well, I've had an attempt at thinking which robots could have a good go at beating Storm II. I didn't add Razer at the time of writing, but I think they're capable.

5 Judges Decisions that Could be Different in 2016
In the 2016 series of Robot Wars, the Judging Criteria changed. Throughout the original run, damage was the most important factor, with aggression second, control third, and style fourth. This was altered in 2016, where aggression became the key factor, ahead of damage, in this era where armour holds up a lot better. A positive change if you ask me. The style category was also completely gone. In short, Damage>Aggression>Control>Style became Aggression>Damage>Control. Here's five Judges' decisions from the original series that I think could have been called the other way in 2016.

Honourable mention: Slicer vs. Lizzard

15 Robots that were 'Cheated'
Perhaps a more controversial list, the 15 Robots that were Cheated. The robots will range from minor casualties, decisions you may not agree with me on, and clear mistreatments.

There was also one more robot who was quite famously 'cheated', but the TV edit makes it hard to tell exactly how unfair its defeat it was. This is why I've left it off the list, as it's hard to report with accuracy, but I'm confident that even if its final defeat was fair, it was still closer to 'cheated' than robots like Indefatigable, so here's a bonus entry.

The 5 Robots I'm the Least Inclined Towards
I've worded the title like that specifically because there can never be a robot that I dislike - anything that appeared on Robot Wars has at least some meaning to me, and as you'll read within the list, some of the robots here still had battles, even against each other, that I enjoyed. But even though I don't outright dislike the robots here, I have qualms with all of them, which I'll share with you all.

Ranking the Seventh Wars Heats
Series 7 is my favourite series, and after some inspiration from The R A Z 3R, I wanted to have a crack at the wiki bloggers' new style of 'definitive rankings', trying to use objective scores to figure out which was the best in the series. I haven't totalled up the points to form a definitive order, nor is one of the categories even worth actual points, but it certainly helped to form the order.

The three categories are:
 * Entertainment - How good were the battles in this episode? Includes the special event.
 * Unseeded heat winner - Was the heat won by a seeded robot? Any heat that wasn't won by a seed instantly has an advantage by my ranking, which I'm sure means that my order won't reflect everyone's opinions, but I've still tried to make it objective otherwise, and it doesn't offer any actual points.
 * Predictability - Did the heat winner seem obvious throughout the episode? Were there any other upsets along the way?

I feel kinda bad ranking certain categories as "1/5" or "2/5" - obviously I love every single episode of Robot Wars, and I'd pick even the bottom episode of this list over most shows any day. The scores are in comparison to other episodes of Robot Wars, not a true ranking of how entertaining the episode was as a TV episode. With that, let's get started.

Ranking the Series 9 competitors... by name!
Series 9 is about to start at the time of writing, and everybody's making their predictions for who they think will do the best in each heat. I was in the filming for three heats (2, 3, 4), so what I can bring to these discussions is limited. What I CAN do, however, is judge the robots based on their names. That will do. Sad to say I'm a little nonplussed with a lot of this year's new names, but there's some gold in there too, so this might come across as overly critical, but isn't that what every Robot Wars fan is doing in the run-up to the new series?

My Awkward First Reactions to All-Star Robots
It's fairly obvious from reading my Top Robots list that I don't tend to favour robots with much success, with Dantomkia being the most successful robot there. This comes from my natural preference to cheer for an underdog, but it can also be attributed to my unusual starting point in Robot Wars. While most people would start with one of the first few series and be blown away by Hypno-Disc, Razer etc, my first episode was BBC Two's re-run of the New Blood Championship, Heat A. This definitely created some awkwardice, as Series 7's seedings gave away the results of Series 6, while the competitor DVD's showed the outcomes of the other five, allowing only Series 7 to be a series I didn't know the outcome of, as even the 2016 series was littered with trailer spoilers. Allow me to share some of my more awkward first reactions to well-known robots.

Hypno-Disc was a competitor in my fourth episode of Robot Wars, the Challenge Belt. To this day, Hypno-Disc remains one of the most famous, loved, and destructive robots. When I saw it for the very first time, it was swept up by Dantomkia and thrown out of the arena in under half a minute. Not the best start then. It even goes beyond that, as my VHS recording of the episode cut this battle out and didn't start until shortly after Vader went out of the arena, so until I got the Hypno-Disc DVD, all I had to go off was a clip of Hypno-Disc being flipped out of the arena within the credits sequence.
 * Hypno-Disc

Iron Maidens was my fifth episode, so while I've already established Storm II as the god of Robot Wars, this was a chance for me to meet some bona-fide legends. Admittedly Behemoth dominated its opening melee, and it wouldn't be long until I got the First World Championship VHS, and its loss against Chompalot might have been dodgy, but it was a loss in my eyes nonetheless. The favourite for the finals, completely unbeknown to me, fell in a totally unexpected way, and I didn't think much of it until after I got that VHS. Pussycat, meanwhile, did in fact make the Final, so they earned some credit. But then they put up a considerably worse fight than Behemoth, and fell easily to Chompalot, and that will forever go down as my first experience with Pussycat. So neither of these robots lived up to their name, but at least Behemoth will be in next week's University Challenge! Wrong! Even ignoring their poor performance in that episode, the BBC Two re-runs ended that week because the Seventh Wars started. With Pussycat in the first episode! They got tossed around repeatedly by my favourite robot and lost again.
 * Behemoth & Pussycat

Here's an example that worked in reverse. When I watched Series 6 with my girlfriend of the time, I got to watch her fully get behind the Terrorhurtz underdog run, and eventually declare it one of her favourite robots. It came out of nowhere in Series 6, and did extraordinarily well, to the surprise of many fans. I, on the other hand, watched Terrorhurtz enter the arena in the Challenge Belt, with the introduction "reached the Grand Final in the main series of the wars". I already knew this was hot stuff. And Terrorhurtz was frightening. Vader, Iron-Awe, Barber-Ous, S.M.I.D.S.Y., one of my instant favourites Dantomkia, all positively battered without space to breathe. Frankly, I was and still am quite afraid of this robot, to the point where I think it could've won the 2016 series under different circumstances. Terrorhurtz is not S3 or Dantomkia, it was never an underdog to me, and it never will be. I felt physical relief when it retired in Series 7. I obviously like the robot now, and Beta was a classic underdog in BattleBots, but my first impression was of an absolute monster.
 * Terrorhurtz

This one's particularly weird for me as 13Black would later crack my favourite robots list, but that's mostly down to Series 6 and Extreme 2, which I hadn't seen 13Black take part in. This was the 7th seed for the Seventh Wars, so that implies a fairly efficient robot will be taking part, so surely you'd want to show that off at the end of Heat C, right? Curiously, the editors didn't brag about the seeded 13Black, or even the dominant Gravity, rather, I distinctly remember Heat D being pegged as the "return of Thor". And for a young lad who's basically seen nothing but the New Blood Championship, this worked perfectly. Thor was this heat's all-star in my eyes, and indeed, they survived for longer than the seeded robot did. Of course Gravity shone through in the end, but I spent that week waiting for Thor, some of the most excitement I've ever felt.
 * 13Black

If you want another example of the "next time" preview picking the more appropriate robot to my tastes, my only time seeing S.M.I.D.S.Y. in action was its absolute murder scene at the hands of Terrorhurtz, so even though I'd never heard of Atomic, it was still a wiser pick than S.M.I.D.S.Y.

Knowing that my first taste of this robot was its Series 7 performance, I'm sure you can figure this one out by yourself. The problem here is that, while my opinions of the other robots on this list were quickly corrected by The First World Championship, Hypno-Disc's DVD etc, Bigger Brother actually kept my analysis for many years. I wasn't impressed with Bigger Brother. It was too short to flip URO properly, couldn't OotA Colossus in the year where such flips were commonplace, lost 'easily' to Iron-Awe, and was clearly much weaker at attacking the House Robots than the other three competitors were in the All-Stars. I know it flipped Shunt, but to me it looked like a real struggle, and then they drove themselves down the pit. I formed the genuine impression that Bigger Brother was too small to be effective, and its flipper was too weak. The Series 5 underdog run went completely over my head, because the Chaos 2 and Hypno-Disc DVDs spoiled the outcome of the fights with Bigger Brother, so I went into them knowing it would win, 'and it still got thrown around by Chaos 2 and annihilated by Hypno-Disc!'. To add to that, Razer made it look pathetic, and it couldn't OotA 3 Stegs to Heaven on the Sir Killalot DVD. It even broke down in the Flipper Frenzy. Nowadays I can obviously tell that Bigger Brother is an amazing machine, but you can tell this opinion lasted a long time, because even in 2013, I was STILL determined that Bigger Brother would easily lose to Atomic, and in this same tournament, I tried to justify Bigger Brother losing to M2, Tough as Nails and Ansgar 3. And what did I claim in my votes against Ansgar 3? Bigger Brother wouldn't be able to flip it.
 * Bigger Brother

Alright, there was room for one 2016 robot in this list. It's very hard to procure a unique 'awkward first reaction' to a robot we were introduced to just this year, but with the reigning champion, Apollo, I found a way. Covered further down the page is a description of the day I went to the live filming of Robot Wars. I saw Apollo on my screen for the very first time, and I didn't have a clue what it was. I didn't recognise Team MAD without Alan Young, and the robot, particularly as it was shot from behind, was in every sense of the word, a white wedge with a flipper. And this was while I already knew about robots such as Toxic 2 and Gravity being declined for 'just being flippers'.
 * Apollo

But even beyond the aesthetic impression, Apollo was mightily played up when it entered the arena, having 'done something no robot has done before', and is 'one to watch', despite it staring my predicted series winner Eruption directly in the face. And when it got out there... it lost! I went to see the champion of Robot Wars fighting live before my eyes, and it got absolutely dominated! I had no reason to believe this robot would take the title, and I still believe that if Eruption didn't get the dodgy loss to Storm2, they would be the Robot Wars champion themselves. Going into the Grand Final on TV, I had pegged Apollo as one of the least likely to win, but there you have it.

The Fundamentally Wrong Episode
As much of a Robot Wars fan as I am, there's one episode in the history of it I have to say was simply done wrong, and that was the Seventh Wars Annihilator. So the premise of an Annihilator is to have a large number of robots in the arena at the same time, and to be completely berserk with all sorts of attacks happening at once.

So what was wrong with this one? Five out of the six competing robots were flippers. But flippers are my favourite weapon, are they not? Yes, they are. I love them because they toss robots about, often out of the arena, and they don't significantly damage their opponents; but four out of the five flippers were low pressure, virtually eliminating OotA potential. So basically, rather than seeing a wide variety of attacks all over the place, all you're going to see is weak flips here and there.

Let me go through all of the robots individually, and see if they're justified. Obviously Kan Opener deserves its place, it didn't have a flipper, and it won the previous Annihilator. No complaints here.

The next one is Raging Knightmare. A low pressure flipper, yes, but Raging Knightmare was a good choice, as a robot from Team Knightmare had appeared in two previous annihilators, Raging Knightmare has proven it can still perform an OotA despite the low pressure, and it also represents a Series Semi-Finalist of the same series.

Then there's Ripper. I also feel Ripper was justified, as it was a very good robot that got placed into a difficult heat. The Annihilator gave it a chance to win, and it could toss robots about, so Ripper's allowed too.

Next we have Robochicken, a third flipper, and the only one that wasn't low pressure. Having a third flipper is pushing it a bit, but I'll pass Robochicken, as half of it was supposed to be axe, and it provided comic relief. It was also a surprisingly good robot, and this was another chance to showcase it. Only problem is, it performed poorly. Team Robochicken removed Robochicken's head (a good part of the robot's comic relief) so that the robot could self right, but after it was flipped within 3 seconds, it didn't. So Robochicken disappointed, but it was a fine choice.

So I've just about passed the first four, now the last two spots should be filled with good robots with other weapons, right?

"Nope."

- Chuck Testa

The first one was Ewe 2. Ewe 2 vs. Tetanus Booster was the poorest Judges decision in the history of the show in my opinion, so Ewe 2 maybe deserved a chance to be in another episode, but the Annihilator was essentially full. Ewe 2 was a poor flipper, its blade was about 6cm Squared, and it was against a flat surface. This makes Ewe 2 difficult to flip with effectively, and when it did flip, the flipper was low pressure, so it's going to have minimal effect. Ewe 2 was bound to be outclassed in the Annihilator, the episode had enough similar robots, and if it can't self-right when side stranded, it couldn't possibly win.

And then the final robot. Flippa. Ahem. What. Flippa had one televised battle prior to the Annihilator, where it didn't move an inch after Activate. Flippa had a very strong chance of doing absolutely nothing again, and even if it did work, it would just be another low pressure flipper. As if we don't have enough. In the Annihilator, Flippa moved for a few seconds, made contact with Ewe 2, and then died without doing a thing of any significance. Yet it just about outlasted Robochicken, so that had to go out, and Flippa was to fight in the next round. At least, it was meant to. Flippa did what was expected of it and never even made it to the arena because of mechanical problems. What a waste of time. I understand why Flippa competed, it takes a lot of work to get an American robot to a UK TV studio, and Mentorn didn't want to waste the one they had, but if a foreign flipper is to compete, I'd rather have Scraptosaur.

I also gather that Panic Attack was invited to compete in the Annihilator before the spaces were filled up. While it would make for a nice all-star, it's still not a good choice by me, as it has a lifting mechanism, which is in the same vein as all of these low pressure flippers, and perhaps more importantly, it was going to be competing in the episode afterwards anyway.

Now don't get the wrong impression, some of the battles were entertaining in this episode, yet some of them were also pretty bad. The first to have flaws was the battle that filled in for Flippa's incompetence, the House Robot Rebellion. A great opportunity to flip some house robots that have never been flipped before, and a last chance to see Gravity. Growler gets flipped straight off the bat, great start. The pit is then opened, and Cassius Chrome drives straight into it. The pit is re-raised, which could be criticised, but I think it's fair enough, as the house robots should get a good showcase in this battle. But if Gravity flips Cassius Chrome and puts it back in the pit, that should be the end of it. But nope, the pit is re-raised and Refbot puts Cassius Chrome back on its wheels. Putting Mr. Psycho in the battle was a tad unfair, there's no way Gravity or Behemoth are supposed to be able to beat that. Sir Killalot would have been a better choice in my opinion, as Gravity could flip that and achieve a fate no other robot ever has. But instead, the invincible Mr. Psycho competes. Or so we thought. Mr. Psycho completely broke down at the end, leaving Cassius Chrome to fight alone, But was Cassius Chrome not defeated earlier in the battle? That should mean instant victory for Gravity and Behemoth, yet instead the decision was given to the audience. Why bother? The competitors had already won.

The other battle in the Annihilator that was annoying was the semi-final. Ripper and Kan Opener had an alliance right from the start, what could Raging Knightmare do? It was tag teamed, and defeated easily in a bit of a poor show. At least Kan Opener attacked in the final.

So if I were to improve it, I'd have to replace Ewe 2 and Flippa. If I was aware of how Robochicken would perform, that'd get ditched too, but I obviously couldn't forsee its performance. So here I would like to decide which robots are good candidates to replace Ewe 2 and Flippa.

Firstly, it would be nice to see some action from a seeded robot, and I think 13 Black would be a good choice. Despite being a Top 8 seed and a very damaging machine, 13 Black did next to nothing in the Seventh Wars, so this would be a great opportunity to see it do something. It should be in working order.

Then for the other, there's a few options. I'd like to add a robot that underperformed in the Seventh Wars, so I'll discuss the candidates. Disc-O-Infeno is one, that didn't do nearly as well as it should have, and it would make for a second returning Annihilator champion. Another robot that underperformed in Series 7 was Pinser, a robot which is never appreciated. This could have been put in, though Kan Opener may have been enough in terms of pincers. Maybe Hydra? I know it's another lifting weapon, but it's half axe, and Hydra never got a chance to show its stuff in Series 7, despite it being a potent machine. Scorpion? Jackson Wallop? Barber'Ous 2 'n a Bit? Tetanus Booster? A Team Vader robot? Fluffy? Edge Hog? They missed a lot of options there. My personal pick would be Scorpion, as we all know the power that had, or Edge Hog to represent the overhead weapons.

So I'm not saying Annihilator was a boring episode to watch, it had its moments, but it could have been done so much better.

Top 10 most obscure Robot Wars items that only ToastUltimatum is somehow capable of owning
Now I can't say I wrote this article myself, but it has my name in it and depicts my surprisingly accurate life, so it counts.