Rise of the Robots

Rise of the Robots was an infamous Fighting Game released in 1994 for the IBM PC, Amiga, Game Gear, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Genesis, Three DO Interactive Multiplayer and Philips CD-i.

The game's premise was dead simple. The Supervisor, a T-1000 Expy, is the central robot in charge of a large robotics plant. All is going well, until a computer virus suddenly gives her sentience. She transmits the virus to the rest of the plant's robot workers, causing them to kill all the humans inside and try to find a way to connect to the outside mainframe. The only way to prevent The Supervisor from uploading the virus to the rest of the city is to kill her. Enter Coton, a cloned Cyborg programmed to fight his way to the Supervisor's lair and kick her ass.

A sequel, Rise 2: Resurrection, was released in 1996 for the Play Station, PC, and Sega Saturn.

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This series contains examples of:

• AI Is a Crapshoot
• All There in the Manual: The only way to learn the series' storyline. Taken Up to Eleven in the second game.
• Artificial Stupidity: The first game's marketing claims that the enemy AI will adapt to the player's fighting styles and learn from their mistakes. The truth: ALL of the enemies can be beaten by repeatedly mashing the kick button until they die.
• The Bad Guy Wins - The Supervisor manages to defeat and absorb the Cyborg, destroying his body and copying his brain patterns to the rest of her robots. Eventually subverted in the second game when it turns out that Coton's personality is intact.
• Blatant Lies: The first game's marketing campaign, period.
• Blob Monster: The Supervisor and V1-Hyper are these, as expected from T-1000 expies.
• Bodyguarding a Badass: The sentry droid.
• Body Snatcher - Coton in Rise 2 simply possesses whatever robot you chose to play as.
• Chrome Champion: Coton and the Supervisor.
• Cyborg: Coton, duh.
• Digitized Sprites - The graphics used pre-rendered 3D backgrounds and sprites, with incredibly fluid animations for each character.
• Excuse Plot: The series' overall plot is paper-thin at best.
• Failsafe Failure - Subverted. The Supervisor's programmers actually thought ahead, and didn't give her access to any network outside the factory in case something like this happened. Doubly Subverted when she absorbs the Cyborg's mind, letting her transmit the virus over a larger area.
• Finishing Move: The second game's executions, which allow you to steal an enemy's move.
• A God Am I - The Supervisor's view on things, post-virus.
• Gotta Kill Them All: The robots in the second game are out to get each others' throats after being infected by the Anarchy Virus. Coton uses this to his advantage to defeat the Supervisor for good.
• Home Version Soundtrack Replacement - The game was heavily advertised as featuring music by Brian May. However, they got into rights issues with EMI. Rather then delaying the game to resolve them, the developers completely replaced May's music with techno music by Fuzzy and Clownlogic.
  • The Brian Mays soundtrack was included on the 3DO and C Di versions, letting the player choose between it or the techno soundtrack. YMMV on which is considered superior.
• Kill'Em All: At the end of the second game, all of the robots are destroyed save for Coton.
• Killer Gorilla: The builder droid/Prime-8 is a killer robot gorilla.
• Loads and Loads of Characters: The second game has at least 20 characters, compared to the first game's 7 characters.
• Melee à Trois: The backstory of the second game.
• Missing Episode - Bell-Fruit's arcade version of Rise 1, which sported the same improvements that would find their way into Rise 2, supposedly making it the only vaguely good version of the game. Though it was fully functional it never made it past location tests, and all cabs are thought to have been lost or destroyed.
• Robot Girl: The Supervisor.
• Samurai: Suikwan is a robot samurai.
• Totally Radical: The redundant ending of the second game.
• A Winner Is You: What you get for beating the Supervisor in both games.