Now, the one thing none of these loony peripherals have offered is the chance to let something else play the games for you. Who has the time to sit down in front of your console and actually make your way through a title, especially when you've made your life more difficult with all these stupid gimmicky controllers? That was the thinking behind ROB, which stood for Robotic Operating Buddy an actual robot Nintendo tried to flog as a peripheral to go along with the NES in Japan. It didn't hang around for long, with only two games produced specifically to go with the android buddy: Gyromite, where the robot presses buttons to raise gates on the screen, and Stack-Up, where he...stacks things up. What fun! Following the video game crash of 1983, Nintendo helped to diversify a little, and make their console look more like a toy than a games console (sort of the opposite of what games companies are trying to do today). ROB worked by receiving optical flashes from the TV screen, but only functions with an old CRT model. Also you had to use 4 AA batteries at any given time, and it got through them pretty quickly. And it couldn't do a whole lot besides bash buttons and pick things up. And it broke all the time. And if you had an especially bright television, you had to put special lenses on so it wouldn't hurt its eyes. A lot of work for not a lot of pay off.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
