You've destroyed my life, all my free time, and quite possibly my grades! Gone, just like that! How could you? How could you?????

I refer, of course, to Last Robot Standing, Wiz-War inspired brainchild of Deadron and the rest of the DDT. This game is so good that I've played it in every moment of spare time in the last two days. So good that it's now my #1 game (yes, higher than my own). So good that it jumped to 4th place in the rankings within ONE DAY of being listed on the hub.

Not bad for an unreleased game with only one server, which is hosted on 56k and has a limit of a mere 8 people logged in at once!

Yes, I'm raving, but not without reason. LRS is trivially easy to learn, but the strategy is deep, complex, and frequently hilarious. As an example, and to show you all how much I rule in this game (heh, heh, heh), here is a description of a recent LRS game I was involved in. The other players were Rayk, Calus CoRPS, and DBZ_Dude1148.

The War Begins

On my first move, I made for one of Rayk's power supplies (stealing two enemy power supplies and bringing them back to your base wins the game), thinking myself relatively safe from attack.

But Rayk, the lucky bastard, had drawn a card (or module, as they're called) that allowed him to get through the forcefield that was between him and the power supply I was aiming for. He ducked through it and scampered up the corridor to meet me. Cheeky fella! He couldn't attack me directly, as it was the first round of the game, but he could find other ways to inconvenience me. Which he did, placing a wall of flame in my way, and using another card to boost it to last for two turns. Three cards in one move; quite a good effort!

Very Good, Mister Rayk, But Not Good Enough!

I'm particularly proud of this little combination: I used Annihilate Wall on a wall next to him, causing him 4 damage and creating a useful shortcut back to my base for later. Then I used the Tractor Beam card to drag him through his own wall of flame (4 damage), onto my tile. Then I created my own wall of flame to our left, boosted it to last two turns as well, used Turbo Charge to permanently give me an extra movement point, and walked out through his flame wall. Four damage to me, but I took it like a man! Well, man-shaped robot. Thanks to the extra movement point, I made it all the way to his power supply, and picked it up. All this in the second turn of the game.

May I say "owned"?

State Of Confusion

It was around this time that I used the new (and very evil, in a good way) Holographic Walls module to create fake walls all over the map, severely confusing everyone except the one person who had thought ahead sufficiently to take the above screenshot. (Me.)

Rayk chose to pass his next turn, rather than endure the damage of the flame wall. Fair enough, too; he was already on only 7 health! As it turned out, I had another Annihilate Wall card handy, so if he had walked through the flames I would have killed him in my next turn. (The third turn of the game...!)

So I trundled up back towards my base like a good robot, boosting my movement to get me all the way there in one go. As I passed, I used Friendly Neurons on Rayk, just to add insult to injury. (Friendly Neurons prevents him from attacking me unless I attack him first.)

Not So Friendly After All

Eventually the flame walls collapsed, and Rayk was free to go. But not before I'd used that other Annihilate Wall card to blow up the wall of his no-longer-a-prison. Boom! Three health for Rayk. Better still, this doesn't technically count as an attack, so Friendly Neurons remained in effect. Hah!

Of course, I'd forgotten that, despite not being able to attack me, he could still steal my power supplies - or, more to the point, steal his own supply back. Drat! But Calus CoRPS got him in the end (and then some) with a Blue Screen Of Death attack that was just slightly overkill. (10 damage!)

The Rest Of The Game

And both my power supplies got stolen, so I had to let DBZ_Dude1148 have one of his power supplies back so I could rescue mine so that I didn't get eliminated from the game. But it turned out that Calus CoRPS couldn't get to his base anyway. He "trapped" me in my base with a wall that turned out to be excellent defence later on (thanks Calus!). Someone used Solar Flare to spray heat walls everywhere at some point. Then he and DBZ_Dude1148 had a fight and I went and re-stole Rayk's power supply and nabbed one of Calus CoRPS's while I was at it, thus winning, which rather surprised DBZ_Dude1148, who hadn't been paying attention and had been wasting movement points wandering around my sector of the map when he could have been attacking me.

Victory!

And that, in a (rather large) nutshell, is why LRS now owns my life. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.