The robots game pits you against evil robots, who are trying to kill you (which is why they are evil). Fortunately for you, even though they are evil, they are not very bright and have a habit of bumping into each other, thus destroying themselves. In order to survive, you must get them to kill each other off, since you have no offensive weaponry.
Since you are stuck without offensive weaponry, you are endowed with one piece of defensive weaponry: a teleportation device. When two robots run into each other or a junk pile, they die. If a robot runs into you, you die. When a robot dies, you get 10 points, and when all the robots die, you start on the next field. This keeps up until they finally get you.
Robots are represented on the screen by a ‘+’, the junk heaps from their collisions by a ‘*’, and you (the good guy) by a ‘@’.
You can move around with the numpad. You can also choose the classic hjkl keys (if you
don’t know what they are, you don’t want them).
Unlike the original robots, you can *not* precede the commands with a count or “run” with
shift.
If you use the ‘w’ command and survive to the next level, you will get a bonus of 10% for each robot which died after you decided to wait. If you die, however, you get nothing. For all other commands, the program will save you from typos by stopping short of being eaten. However, with ‘w’ you take the risk of dying by miscalculation.
Automatically teleport if there is no other option remaining.
With this option enabled, the game will *not* prevent you from making a move that would mean
certain death. This significantly increases the difficulty.
Robots is a reproduction of the 1980 “classic” robots game for BSD UNIX.
Copyright © 2012-2016 Martin Tournoij <martin@arp242.net>
The original robots was created by Ken Arnold.