Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots Preview

If you're old enough to remember these toys, um, you're old enough to remember Star Wars when it first came out. Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots were plastic toys where you assumed control of one of two prefabricated pugilists and tried to literally knock the other guy's head off. Fortunately, you could always put those parts back on and start all over again. Practically a precursor to the fighting-game genre, Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots are now about to floor a whole new generation as Mattel Interactive is bringing the franchise back from the dead in a brand-new game for PlayStation.

Using the now-famous Thrill Kill/ Wu-Tang game engine, Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots drops the combatant total to two, allowing the developers a lot more polygons per fighter, resulting in detailed robots. The game features one- or two-player action, and you can customize your robots with hundreds of parts won by beating opponents and swiping their parts. Different parts combinations will alter what kind of combos each robot can do. Paradox Entertainment is aiming at having more than a quarter of a million parts combinations by the time the game is done. Multiply that with the number of possible combos, and you'll see that the design team's goals are ambitious. Hand-to-hand melee combat, as well as ranged projectile attacks, is possible. As is the standard these days, you can move in and out of the foreground and use the entire arena.

Since the game is not scheduled to arrive until November of this year, Paradox has lots of time to implement its lofty goals into real-world software. From what we've seen thus far, it looks like Paradox may come up with a neat new addition to the fighting-game genre. We'll be back with more details as they emerge.