MindRover: The Europa Project

Discount Price: $50.00

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PC Gamer (1-year)

Customer Reviews:

The Game that I've always wanted [Posted on 2000-12-02]
After playing a lot of games this one has kept my interest and keeps me coming back for more. No matter what level you want to play at Mindrover keeps delivering challenging play and cool graphics. The most interesting thing is after you design your vehicle you sit back and let it do it's work. I find myself cheering for the robot that I created.

Mindrover I believe is a break out game.

What a great game [Posted on 2001-06-05]
I really like this game for a few different reasons. I've always wanted to program a game but never had the programming skills. Now I know even if I had the skills I would have got caught up on the AI programming. Using a drag-and-drop interface you can program in the logic for a virtual robot. You give it the logic and let it run wild. The reason I gave this 4 stars is because the tutorial only takes you so far and there's no documentation for the behind-the-scenes programming language, ICE. There is on the web but not in printed form when you buy it. A simple reference with a syntax diagram and one or two examples would have been fine. But the forum on the official website is quite good. This game is good at inadvertently teaching you how to program in a very fun manner. Even some indirect object oriented stuff. You have objects like thrusters which you then tie to other objects like the "track sensors", capturing events and having them respond accordingly. This is right out of a Visual Basic course (on click command button pop up dialog box). You can play this whole game and not even know there's a programming language involved. But if you know some programming you'll start to get frustrated the way HTML writers would get trying to use FrontPage. You know what logic you want to implement and could do it with a typed program but can't get seem to figure it out through the drag-and-drop interface. In other words you might out grow the drag-and-drop and groan "I need more power!" (which is there but instruction on using it is somewhat fleeting, in my opinion).

I can see how this could be frustrating to somebody coming from a Quake or Deer Hunter 3 type game background. It's not like other games. A lot of patience and frustration tolerance is a good thing to have for this game.

I would like to say this would be a great game for an introduction to programming class. The first half of the class could be for drag and drop and logic introduction, the second half could introduce ICE (which borrows liberally from BASIC, or more specifically some sort of VBScript derivative). And maybe extra credit for the best over-all intelligent rover. You can set two human made bots against each other in various scenarios like racing, capture the flag, "sumo" contests and hockey (not to mention battles) and even make up teams of two bots that communicate with each other. High schools be warned though: it insists on a 3d accelerator to run, at least it uses OpenGL.

If there's one major gripe I have with this game it's the ability to win against the game default AI rovers by simply taking advantage of their lack of AI. For example I beat the "chase" scenario with one of my bots that had a logic error. You're supposed to chase the other rover around until you run into and "tag" it. My rover got stuck running into a wall. The rival rover inadvertently ran into me as I sat there hitting this wall, so I won the scenario.

Anybody regardless of programming experience can effectively play this game given the patience to do so. Overall a very excellent game.

Wonderful, distinguished piece of software art [Posted on 2001-09-03]
While this game is not as original as many people think (RobotWare for Apple II by Muse Software in 1981 was the first of its type) this is an absolutely fantastic game. Easy to learn, hard to master, and VERY fun. This is the thinking person's game. Educational and addictive for kids (probably above about 12) and adults like me who wish they spent more time with products like this when they were young. Difficult to recommend this too highly.

This is a great game and a revolutionary effort! [Posted on 2001-11-09]
Cognitoy's Mindrover is a great game as one is able to design and program robots and then have them operate in a 3D cyber space or, thru downloading the software via infrared,
have the same programming operating a real world physical robot!

Supporting an increasing set of robots: beginning with Lego Mindstorms and most recently (as detailed in the December 2001 Poptronics Robotics column), support for OOPIC. Rumor has it other processors/robot kits are in the pipeline making the possibilities mind-boggling.

More cerebral than pure reckless fun, this is a thinking beings adventure with direct results and an expanding universe.

I installed this software on both Red Hat Linux and WindowsXP and although it seems somewhat sensitive to what 3D/OpenGL support there is; both ran fine. ...

A solid programming game [Posted on 2008-05-17]
In this game, you design and wire up robots and then place them in the arena to complete specific tasks - defeat the enemy robots, capture the flag, knock your opponent off the mat, win a race around a figure-eight, or navigate your way out of a maze. It's a really neat idea, though not terribly original. For many years I played the programming game Robot Battle, in which you write tank robot AI using a C-like scripting language, and so I was no stranger to AI games. Mindrover is in some areas an improvement, and in others it remains too simplistic.

Let's start with the good. The UI for the game is spot on, and I think one of the most important points. Programming games often have a steep learning curve, but the event-driven approach here makes it dead simple to get started - attach a radar to the vehicle, wire it to the rocket launcher, and then when the radar detects an enemy it will fire the rocket. There are tutorial missions that ease you into some of the basic concepts, like steering, but much is left for the player to discover (and that's a good thing!). Also, while most programming games focus on simply destroying all enemies, Mindrover offers a wide range of challenges to complete. Bored of blowing stuff up? Try to navigate out of a randomly-generated maze instead!

The 3D battles (unique among programming games) are very entertaining to watch, and brings your creations to life, though I often wished for slow-motion playback so I could figure out just what went wrong. The game is based on some iteration of the glQuake engine, so the visuals are a little dated, but have held up well. Sound effects are decent and the music is great.

I have two issues with the game. The first is that the event-driven robot brain is not well-suited for complicated programming tasks. Some things are made very easy (like the radar example above), but more complex tasks become very troublesome to implement. In one case I wanted a robot that cycled through scanning three objects and steered itself towards the nearest one. The layout to accomplish this was a mess of wires and bizarre parts, and the whole thing felt like a hack that could just barely work. So many times I wished for a scripting language component so I could just type in what I wanted to accomplish! (Reading other reviews I see it IS possible to write ICE code directly... too bad it's never mentioned anywhere in the game!)

Also, I think the game has some balance issues. Some components (X/Y Finder comes to mind) were hardly, if ever, used. Some weapons are far more useful than others (e.g. a slow rocket launcher needs supporting range-checking hardware to make sure you don't get killed by splash-damage, but a laser can be fired quickly and relentlessly with no ill effects). Movement seemed to be a waste of time in most battle missions, because usually a stationary turret laden with lasers would destroy most anything. And for any mission requiring speed, any chassis besides the Small Wheeled Vehicle was a waste of time.

Overall, though, I commend the developers of this game for taking such a thoroughly logical-thinking game and making it accessible to players of all ages. Graphics and sound are good, the variety of objectives keeps things interesting, and it will give your brain a workout. Definitely play it, if you get a chance. A good one for the kids too. (Get a friend in on it too - there are not enough stages, and once you've beaten the Hard stock robots, you will probably crave more competition!)

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