TransBot (Master System)
TransBot, Astro Flash, Nuclear Creature… this is a game that goes by many names, and none of them are really good. TransBot at least seems to be somewhat accurate, as you can transform into a robot, but surprisingly, for a game that puts the robot on the box, this game secretly doesn’t really want you to use the robot all that much.
TransBot is a pretty standard space shooter, the action moving from left to right automatically as you move around to avoid or shoot enemies. The story makes no appearance in the game, but the manual does paint a tale that mankind would get into a nuclear war in the year 2000 that required people to rebuild after the devastation. However, a computer called DALAUS is trying to muscle in on that process and rebuild the world with it as the new ruler, dispensing various mostly spherical foes to enforce its will. Taking control of the CA-214 starfighter, the player is tasked with taking down DALAUS and its troops, but DALAUS’s forces aren’t really that great. Many enemies have hardly any attack capabilities, either relying on their numbers so they can bump into the player’s ship or firing small projectiles that look a bit like baseballs to try and shoot the CA-214 down. Surprisingly for an early space shooter, the CA-214 can take a few hits before going down, although its standard weapon is pretty standard in that most enemies will go down to a single shot.
TransBot didn’t get its strange name from being about a starfighter though. When trucks roll into view, you can blast them open to get a power-up. The power-up starts a roulette at the top of the screen, letters cycling from A to G until the player stops it. A is the default weapon and G is simply a health and ammo refill, but if you land on any of the letters between the two, you get a new weapon or you transform into a robot. The robot controls about the same as the starfighter, but the weapons it gets are far much better. While the starfighter’s weapons are mostly variations on the basic shot that hardly improve its capabilities in combat, the robot has a spread shot, a shot that fires both forward and back, and one that fires a long vertical beam that can obliterate the enemies before you. Very quickly, the vertical beam, C, stands out as the spot you want to stop on the roulette, save when you wish to get an ammo refill for it since all special weapons can run out and revert back to the default A weapon. The roulette isn’t even that hard to stop reliably save when the screen gets a little busy, but most the time the game hardly asks much of the player so you can usually focus on the roulette without too much worry. There really aren’t many functions to the weapons that would inspire you to deviate from a favorite save the one that also fires backwards, so the game doesn’t seem to encourage experimentation either as they all are acceptable, just with some being clearly superior.
Even if you don’t rely on the C weapon, the challenges before you aren’t that hard. Enemies move in from the right in very predictable manners with very few tricks to shake things up. Most segments of gameplay involve facing the same thing a couple times as if the game wasn’t sure you understood how to avoid it the first time, but save a few moments where it throws multiple enemy types on the screen at once, everything is pretty easy to deal with. Lives are earned at pretty distant score goalposts, and while things aren’t really hard, it’s still likely you’ll die eventually and once you’re out of lives, you’re made to restart. This can seem punishing, but the game hardly has any content and it will loop eventually, although it does at least start trotting out some new enemy types if you stick it out and keep heading forward.
Earlier I mentioned that the game doesn’t seem to want you to be a robot, and that plays into the ultimate goal of the game: beating DALAUS. As I was playing, I was confused why the game seemed to be going on infinitely even though I was getting further and further each run, and when the game completed one full loop after already dishing out wave after wave of already similar content, I became suspicious. It turns out, in order to enter DALAUS’s underground layer and face the boss, you need to have the D weapon set at certain points during the game, something the game never hints at and is unlikely to come up naturally for a few reasons. The manual does suggest there are special conditions to make the underground base appear, but it leaves the means a secret and seems to think it will be stumbled upon naturally, but the D weapon isn’t special or particularly good. It’s a shot that fires through enemies rather than being stopped by contact, and it’s a starfighter form to boot, meaning the superior robot forms are just there if you want to rack up points killing enemies. If you do have the D weapon at the right point, you are meant to fire it at some cross like enemies to open up the path to the underground, but there we have another issue. These cross-like enemies at first read as a way of making you consider your shots instead of firing madly. Every other weapon that hits these foes will fail to kill it, instead making it attack you with a large blast of the baseball-like bullets. So, the game has taught you to never shoot this enemy, and the manual only backs up the idea you should never shoot it.
Perhaps the worst part of the unknowable requirements to get underground is what you’ll realize when you get down there… this game only has two levels. Although there are distinct phases to the above ground level, the action is consistent if a bit slow and the backgrounds are only slightly different as you go. Underground, things do look different and the enemies you encounter are arranged in different ways, ending with the boss battle that is probably easier than the rather aggressive swarms of diamond shaped enemies you find above ground. After you beat the boss though, you pop back out to the top and either can repeat that process ad infinitum or you can just keep flying across the surface facing marginally different foes. Both levels do have a few enemy types with new tricks introduced as you get further into their otherwise constant rehashing. For example, there are enemies that fly in from the left instead and can hit you if you’ve tried to hug the edge of the screen for safety from an enemy force that usually comes in from the right. These enemies are the only ones that will damage you this way besides the trucks thankfully, and after it gets you one time you at least learn that you should fly a little further ahead so you can see them coming. Besides a few enemies that fire more intelligently or move faster though, you’ve seen most everything the game has after beating the boss the first time and there’s no actual ending to the game besides your inevitable death.
THE VERDICT: TransBot truly is one of the most basic of old space shooters, choosing not even to embrace the one aspect it really had going for it. Most of its weapons are too similar and not very enjoyable, and the more interesting ones are discouraged if you actually want a change of pace from the monotony of the first level so you can add the monotony of the second level to the rotation. No weapon is so bad that you can’t handle what you’re facing, but the power discrepancy does mean you’re really good if you have the robot weapons and you’re aching for them if you’re stuck in the starfighter mode until you can find another truck to rob.
And so, I give TransBot for the Sega Master System…
A BAD rating. While TransBot doesn’t do too much right beside having the basic components of a functional space shooter, it doesn’t have many things to make it downright terrible either. To call this game worse than simply bad would be like trying to label Pong as something truly awful. There just isn’t enough going on in TransBot to make it worthy of disliking that much, and what it does do is mostly generic or uninspired. It would be very easy to fix it up into something at least acceptable, adding more level variety and diversifying the enemies could help, as would improving the weapons and encouraging you to use something besides one that arbitrarily opens the way onward.
TransBot is a game so short and uninteresting that it wears out its welcome right after it has barely just started. Everything is functional, but the functions are completely standard, with its one unique gimmick of the weapon types reduced to either using the one the game wants you to use or using the one that makes the game a bit more enjoyable. In an already saturated retro genre, TransBot manages to be a little bit worse than bog standard despite not doing much different.