Well, the greatest sport known to humanity is back and…it’s wow. I’m not going to say that Battlebots will be the best thing that happens in 2020, but I’m not going to say it won’t be. The format is essentially the same: Two 250 pound robots bashing each other until one of them is too damaged to continue or three minutes pass. There are a couple of new wrinkles. Robots without wheels can be a lot bigger (500 pounds, I think), there’s no audience, and they’ve upgraded the hazards inside the battlebox so they’re presumably more than just nuisances. Other than that? It’s Battlebots. What more do you want?
There will be spoilers here. There will be so many spoilers. There will be very little that is not spoiler. If you don’t want to know how the fights turned out, you are in the wrong place.
OK, now that we’re clear, let’s go over the fights in this 2 hour season opener!
Fight 1: Sawblaze v. Whiplash
This promised to be a heck of a fight. Jamison Go’s Sawblaze made the quarterfinals last year and Jeff Vasquez’ Whiplash made the semifinals. Go and Vasquez are two of the best drivers around and their bots are among the most reliable and maneuverable, although neither of them are huge hitters. Or, at least, they weren’t last year.
Sawblaze somehow got lower to the ground than last year, and the dustpan forks on the front of it pushed Whiplash around for most of the early going. Whiplash got in a couple of hits with their articulated spinner, but they never really squared up on Sawblaze and, even after taking out one of their opponents’ tires, couldn’t win the shoving match.
Last year, Sawblaze introduced a new type of weapon: The hammer-saw. Instead of just using a sawblade on an arm that swung down on the top of their foes, they added some weight to the blade and swung the it with a great deal more force. It had never been especially destructive, but this time, with Whiplash pinned against the screws, Sawblaze brought the weapon down and split the top armor plate. Something important (and probably expensive) broke in Whiplash as it was rendered immobile and counted out.
Winner: Sawblaze (knockout)
Fight 2: MatCatter v. Fusion
I had MadCatter figured as a sacrificial lamb for the new bot from Team Whyachi. Fusion is a combination spinner; horizontal on one side and vertical on the other. The Ewert family had been pretty successful introducing new bots (check out Hydra last year), and Fusion looked like a good one. Meanwhile, Madcatter looked like…a cat. A cat with a vertical spinner and a kind of goofy paw-lifter device, but still…it didn’t look like it could live up to Martin Mason’s enthusiasm (not that anything could).
MadCatter performed the mother of all box rushes, sprinting across the box and bopping Fusion before either of them could get their spinners up to speed. The initial hit seemed to take all the speed out of MadCatter, but Fusion wasn’t exactly running rings around them.
In fact, it was MadCatter that was clearly on top, picking its spots, getting under Fusion, and delivering hits and trying fruitlessly to flip the other bot. The cat wasn’t doing a lot, but it was the only bot doing anything. Fusion was struggling mightily with things like “going in a straight line” and eventually started smoking, which is often a precursor to stopping entirely. That was the case here and the bot I thought was just there to provide an opponent won a pretty convincing victory.
Winner: MadCatter (knockout)
Fight 3: Axe Backwards v. Malice
Speaking of sacrificial lambs: Kurt Durjan’s Axe Backwards. This genuinely interesting looking bot, a full-body vertical spinner, has been dissected by some very ordinary bots and just destroyed by some of the good ones. Malice, driven by rookie Bunny Sauriol, was an unknown quantity, but the 65 pound horizontal drum spinner looked menacing enough to make me think the newbie would make short work of Axe Backwards.
Kurt taunted Bunny during the countdown, but once the fight started, the roles reversed immediately. A single hit effectively ended Axe Backwards as a mobile piece of machinery. Malice could have just pounded Axe Backwards to a pulp, but after getting in a couple more shots, she backed off and let the referee count out the flaming wreck of little plastic-y axes.
Winner: Malice (knockout)
Fight 4: Bloodsport v. Skorpios
Justin Marple’s Bloodsport had an impressive debut last year, albeit against some seriously inept bots (thankfully, the multi-bot trend has almost completely died out). Zach Lyttle’s Skorpios went a long way in the tournament last year largely by being very well-driven and very hard to hurt, but without doing much in the way of damage.
I had Skorpios as the favorite based on what I saw of Bloodsport last year, but this year’s version is a very different bot. The horizontal lawnmower blade was replaced by a spinning disk which was clever, because Skorpios’ already weak weapon was never going to get through it without destroying it’s own saw. This proved to be the case, as the first time Skorpios brought the saw down, it was bent and rendered ineffective almost immediately.
Bloodsport also surprised me by managed to get under Skorpios, something that very few bots have managed. There were no huge hits, but it was a death by a thousand cuts as Bloodsport took apart Skorpios’ front wedge and kept pounding the underside of one of the lowest bots around. Eventually, Skorpios just stopped moving and that has traditionally been something that was very difficult to achieve. Impressive.
Winner: Bloodsport (knockout)
Fight 5: Captain Shredderator v. Lock-Jaw
Brian Nave’s Captain Shredderator has been around forever now, and very little has changed. It’s a brutal full body spinner that can do tremendous damage to an opponent while doing as much, or more, damage to itself. There was a lot of talk pre-match about how he’d simplified the bot to try to make it more reliable. In the other corner was another known quantity: Donald Hutson’s Lock-Jaw. It looked pretty much the same as always, but apparently, this was a ground-up rebuild.
I figured Lock-Jaw had this one in the bag on theory that betting on the bot that won’t beat itself is usually a good bet. But, the Captain came out swinging and knocked half of the back wedge off of Lock-Jaw right off the bat. Meanwhile, Lock-Jaw kept getting its front forks stuck in the killsaw slots because it always does that and why would you try to fix a problem like that oh my god it is so frustrating.
Lock-Jaw wasn’t moving to well, but Shredderator did the Shredderator thing of getting a big hit and coming off worse than its opponent. The Captain started smoking and eventually couldn’t move. The post-match piece blamed it on a small piece of wire that caused the brakes to engage constantly and burned out the motors. Sigh.
Winner: Lock-Jaw (knockout)
Fight 6: Rusty v. Sporkinok
This fight featured a couple of rookies and I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that neither of them make the knockout stages. Lilith Sprect’s Sporkinok is a Swiss Army bot that can be configured with either a hammer or a lifter. She went with the lifter this time, which, while disappointing from a “I like to see things hit each other” standpoint, made sense. Rusty, the brainchild of David Eaton was very steampunk looking assemblage of parts found on the farm, featuring a very short ranged hammer-spike device and what looked like an Ikea mixing bowl on it’s “head.”
Neither bot maneuvered well at all, so the “box rush” was more of a drunken stagger. Sporkinok get on the side of Rusty and flipped him over and that looked to have been that. I’m not exactly sure how, but Rusty somehow managed to self-right and start deploying the hammer-spike thingie.
It’s hard to know for sure if Rusty ever landed any blows and, if so, what they did, but two of Sporkinok’s wheels appeared to lock up. The immobile bot was counted out and the barely mobile Rusty got the win.
Winner: Rusty (knockout)
Fight 7: Sharko v. Smeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
These were, if nothing else, two of the more interesting bots on the card. Edward Robinson’s Sharko was an upgrade to last year’s Sharkoprion, a bot assembled out of, among other things, wheelchair parts. Instead of the world’s least-used vertical disk spinner, they opted for an impressive looking crusher in the jaws of the shark. Smee (add as many “e” as you like; I’m done) is a really unique design. It’s 14’ long and basically just a series of wedges with a small horizontal spinner on each end. The idea is that it’ll make contact with the opponent and then the sides will wrap around and eat their tires.
This wasn’t a great fight, but that was most because the bots were poorly matched. Sharko was never going to get its jaws on Smee, and Smee couldn’t really get around the enormous Sharko and, even if it could, Sharko’s wheels were too big and solid to damage.
The fight consisted mostly of Sharko spinning around and whippings its tail while Smee was slooooowly chewing its tires. I’m eager to see how either of these bots fare against more conventional opponents, but this match just didn’t work. This one went the distance, and Smee won since “a little damage” is better than “no damage whatsoever.”
Winner: Smee (unanimous decision)
Fight 8: End Game v. Tombstone
This was the main event, and for good reason. Ray Billings’ Tombstone is not just one of the most entertaining bots; it’s also one of the best and Ray really enjoys his overdog status. Nick Mabey’s End Game came over from New Zealand two years ago to a lot of hype, but reliability (and a torn-up battlebox) have prevented them from quite living up to it. These were two incredibly destructive bots and it as a near-certainty that it wouldn’t go the distance.
It did not go the distance.
The opening exchanges were explosive but largely even as the bots went weapon-to-weapon right off the bat. There was the sense that one big hit to anything but a weapon would end the fight quickly and, wouldn’t you know it? That’s pretty much how it went down.
End Game got a good hit that put Tombstone off-balance and drove it into the screws. One of the Tombstone’s wheels got stuck, leaving the King of Kinetic Energy a sitting duck. End Game moved in and blasted Tombstone over the screws and out of the arena for a very quick and decisive win.
Winner: End Game (knockout)
Well, that had a little of everything, didn’t it? Fireballs, upsets, close fights, not at all close fights, comically inept bots. With 7 knockouts in 8 fights, there weren’t even any “Duck was robbed” moments where the judges made a baffling decision.
I wouldn’t call it a legendary episode, but it was a very good one and if the rest of the season can keep it going, this is going to be a lot of fun.