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"...So, this is kinda a game for geeks?"

A friend had walked in while I was playing MindRover, I'd tried to explain what the point was and that was their initial reaction. In many ways, you do need to be a certain type of person to really enjoy MindRover the way I did. Nevertheless, MindRover has to be the most original game I've played in a long time.

Gameplay

After you have looked at your scenario, chosen your vehicle and equipped it with sensors, then you can wire all the components together to give your rover some form of intelligence. For example, you can add two track sensors pointing left and right, then wire them up to a steering wheel, allowing your vehicle to follow the tracks. Or you could wire up a radar that looks forward and fires a rocket or a laser every time it is set off.

Feeling a little more brave? You could set up two robots that pass information back and forth between each other allowing them to collectively take on opponents. The wiring system allows you to create AND gates, have up to seven different behavioural modes, make things time dependent and a huge range of other functions.

The screenshot at the right shows various different logic, timing and mode elements available in the game.

The interface is actually a frontend to a complete programming language that looks like a cross between Java and Visual Basic. Called ICE, this language allows you to add new components, vehicles, scenarios and basically adds an infinite level of expandability to MindRover. Already, CogniToy has released several add-on packs with many more additional components available around the Internet. When MindRover is installed, all the necessary compilers and support files are added so you are ready to develop upon installation.

In fact, when you are creating your rovers within the MindRover game, it runs the compiler before the start of the scenario. The interface basically creates all the necesary ICE code for you on-the-fly. Actually, it is the interface that is the only real problem with the game. Well, not so much a problem, but it can drag the gameplay down a little when your rovers get complicated. You can filter out some wire colours etc., but features like a grid snap feature, automatic align, multi-point (and smaller) arrows could have really helped with rover design.

Graphics

Saying all of this, I do have a few complaints about the graphics. The smoke can slow down the game considerably, even on our test machine (PIII-933, GeForce2 GTS 32Mb) and there are a few camera quirks. You'll find the game stepping outside of the arena and some funky clipping occurs.

Like I mentioned in the gameplay section, the GUI can often get very confusing, and some additional graphics tweaks could have made it much easier to navigate. The arrows are very bulky, there is no sort of grid to help align and the wires cannot be made up of more than point.

Artificial Intelligence

Since it is up to the player to provide the bulk of the game with its artificial intelligence, there isn't too much I can say to fault it! If you create a rover that has better artificial intelligence than even the best CogniToy rival, then simply substitute your rover for the rival, and try and beat your own creation. Alternatively, you can browse the internet for better opponents and use them. The expandability and longevity of this game are definitely two major strong points of the game.

.: Interview with Kent Quirk :. Do you see modern AI techniques being useful in MindRover? ...I seriously considered using fuzzy logic as the implementation system, and ran into the "fun" barrier. Fuzzy logic programming requires a small amount of thinking about the fuzzy system, and a whole lot of tweaking parameters. When a MindRover design fails, it usually fails in fun, interesting, and often spectacular ways. When fuzzy logic fails, it just doesn't work as well as you'd expected, and you might not have a good idea why. I also wanted it to be realistic with respect to real robots. The MindRover virtual machine (VM) was designed to be similar in power to a small embedded CPU. Each robot is running its own computer, and its only knowledge of the world is what it can glean from its sensors, which are mostly realistic. (Though we did stretch reality in a few places to make things more fun.) .: Full Interview :.

It is often interesting to see how plain stupidity can beat advanced AI - you can create rovers that use a finely adjusted mechanism of timers and switches to create almost unbeatable opponents. The key is to be able to move your rovers from scenario to scenario; if one battle bot easily wins one battle scenario, but dies quickly in another there is definite room for improvement. You can of course take advantage of the idiosyncrasies of the various levels if you wish - it is all up to the player.

Conclusion

Was my friend right, though? Do you need to be a 'geek' to enjoy this? Not really, but you do need to have a sort of programmers patience. Do you enjoying playing with components and seeing what they do? Do you like challenges that you really have to work for to accomplish? Do you enjoy constantly improving on your own designs? If you answer to most of these was yes, you will definitely enjoy MindRover.

Go forth and buy...

	9.0
	Platform: PC Liked: Programmable AI, infinitely expandable, incredibly original, programmable AI, longevity, great community support, and...programmable AI! Disliked: GUI a little messy at times.