[url]http://www.extremerobots.co.uk[/url]
Our long planned Robot Wars day out was upon us at last. Sure I booked this last year, after failing to get tickets to a similar event in Maidstone. This was at the Moutbatten Centre in Portsmouth, in a big sports hall, with a custom built robot wars style arena in the middle of the room. Tiered seating on three sides with the fourth side a "pit" area for working on the robots.
This was not official Robot Wars, though the same people have toured this same show using the name Robot Wars Live for years. Some issue with the BBC recently meant renaming their event, and I think handing back the robotwars.tv1 domain name. Anyway, was lots of the same robots from the TV including Foxic and Stinger, and familiar faces too including Team Gabriel and Team Shockwave.
We had vip tickets! So a special lanyard, best seating, and a tour of the pits too! However at least half of the people there must have had the vip pass, so we weren't so special. We were in near the front of the queue so got our pick of the best seating too. Hard to know where would be best to sit, the people who got in first headed up to the top row, but the front floor-level row was reserves, so would that be best? We went for the middle, so we could see down on to the floor of the arena, but still be as close as possible.
As we were getting settled in the arena in the middle was in darkness and lights were shining on us so couldn't see a thing. We hit the merch stand for t-shirts and big foam hands and settled in. I would say it was pretty much sold out. There was some warm up entertainment music and messages on the big screens, a little quiz for the kids.
The show started with a bang, lights on the arena and three heavyweight robots are smashing each other up. We thought one was Gabriel off TV, but it turns out to be Saint, a similar looking robot from the same team. One was Kan Opener and the other was a powerful flipper. We then had more bouts, some one on one, some melee style, some with smaller robots, and a few with the big house robot Major Damage. The arena has a pit that opens (much panto-style shouting for it) and a flipper built into the floor. Don't think we saw much of the flipper. There were two corners where it was possible to throw another robot out of the arena (everyone wants to see this now) while most of the arena was safely enclosed.
We had a few other exhibition things, a climbing robot (that unfortunately failed), some big robot costumes, Wall-E out of the arena and a Wall-E copy in the arena that got cut in half. There was a dalek too, and a stormtrooper who was advertising another forthcoming show, but no R2D2 which I'd heard from a previous show.
We had a tour of the pits and the arena at half time, but as there were so many others with the VIP upgrade it was a bit of a crush. Our bigger boy loved it all, the smaller one was nervous around the big robots and didn't enjoy it so much. We have one bit on our video of the day where they're BOTH sulking, this was just after number one accidentally knocked number two over in the pits, and I told him off.
All in, an excellent experience, not expensive either if you don't buy t-shirts and things...
Paul Clarke's blog - I live in Hythe in the far South. Wed to Clare + father to 2, I am a full stack web engineer, + I do js / nodejs, some ruby, python, php ect ect. I like pubs, parkrun, eating, home automation + other diy stuff, history, genealogy, TV, squirrels, pirates, lego, + TIME TRAVEL.