Larry DeMar, co-creator of the Williams arcade classics Defender, Stargate, and Robotron, once said that a game shouldn't be too easy: "Contrary to what a lot of people would believe, a game that you walk up to and play twenty minutes on immediately you're not gonna be very interested in. You need the new conquest, you need to go up there and have it going 'You're dog food' for you to want to come back and try and learn and beat it."

Let's get one thing out of the way right at the beginning of this review. I am a fan of Robotron:2084 — a big fan. I first encountered the game at the 1984 World's Fair in Knoxville, and it immediately made a lasting impression on me. From that point on I sought out any Robotron machine I could find, and I actually had dreams of blasting Grunts and Brains. It became an obsession that has lasted to this day.

Setting up a MAME cabinet, especially one that is going to run on DOS, can sometimes be a frustrating exercise in bug hunting and driver snafus. Getting everything working well together is difficult, and the problems are even compounded further when you have an arcade monitor, or try to add other emulators besides MAME.