Video Game / Robot Wants

Robot Wants is a series of Metroidvania games, developed by Hamumu Games, that follows a robot as he searches for important items through dangerous and very hostile futuristic environments.

Each game involves the robot utilizing various (and sometimes ridiculous) abilities and tools to access new parts of the environment, while also using an animal (including a cat and dog) to help in their adventure. All of the games also feature massive bosses, plenty of secrets and challenges for speedrunners. Due to the series' nature and scope, the games aren't nearly as long as other Hamumu games (or Metroidvania games in general). Nonetheless, the series is often considered a worthy addition to the Hamumu game roster, especially as part of the Hamumu Clubhouse revamp.

There are four original Flash games in the series:

• Robot Wants Kitty (which later had an expanded version released for iOS), in which Robot, in an unnamed facility, goes to look for Kitty, braving obstacles and enemies while getting powerups to do so.
• Robot Wants Puppy, where Robot travels to an unknown space facility to get a second friend in Puppy, who is being held at the facility.
• Robot Wants Fishy, where Robot travels to the dangerous mining facility of Regulus IX to find the last friendly lifeform, Fishy.
• Robot Wants Ice Cream, the Series Fauxnale. Robot travels to Happy Ice Cream Planet to get some delicious treats, only to find the planet under attack by a fleet of robots led by Tom Stone, a square stone being who wants all the ice cream for himself.

A Compilation Re-release, Robot Wants It All, was released on April 4th, 2019. The compilation includes the original games, a "remixed" and "easy" version for each game, as well as:

• Robot Wants Y, which was originally made as a banner game for the Jay is Games website (later removed from the site), in which Robot is inside a cavern and collects letters to get powerups, seeking the letter Y. Said to be non-canon to the series.
• Robot Wants Justice, the Grand Finale of the series. In the Galactic Nexus, the planet Durpos exploded, as planets sometimes do, killing millions of Durpoids and leaving the survivors homeless. Emperor Tronk allows them sanctuary on his lava planet, only to enslave them and eat some of them as snacks. Robot decides he can no longer allow Tronk's tyranny to stand and sets out to rescue the Durpoids.

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Robot Wants Tropes:

Multiple games

• Ambiguous Gender: All of the animals have an unknown gender. Fishy is confirmed as female in It All.
• Attack Animal: In Puppy, Robot throws Kitty at enemies to attack them. In Ice Cream, Puppy can mount a turret to shoot at enemies.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Defeating the first boss of Puppy requires you to throw the cat through the opening in its force field. Obtuse Angler from Fishy can only be hit on its bulb. Drillbaby, from the same game, needs to be defeated by dropping bombs from the ceiling onto its core.
• Backtracking: Most games in the series require you to do this to find the rest of the upgrades/collectibles required for 100% Completion.
• Bag of Spilling: Exaggerated- every level has Robot lose his powerups, requiring him to get new ones. This is Hand Waved as the powerups being temporary.
• Cats Are Mean: Kitty hates Puppy, eats Fishy, and becomes the Big Bad of Ice Cream, attacking Happy Ice Cream Planet just to get revenge on Robot for abandoning him for his bad behavior.
• Checkpoint: The Transmatter Computrons, which also restore Robot's shield/hearts/chasis.
• Chiptune: Chiptune music is used in all games except the original release of Y, which was silent.
• Cores-and-Turrets Boss: PAL-1000 from Fishy, and the two security cores from Ice Cream.
• Cruel Twist Ending / "Shaggy Dog" Story: Most of the sequels to Kitty. Y and Justice have no twists, although It All points out how obtaining the letter Y isn't exactly impressive.
  • Robot got Puppy! Kitty hates Puppy!
  • Robot got Fishy! Kitty loves Fishy.
  • Robot got ice cream! But he has no mouth.
• Double Jump: Every game has this as an upgrade for Robot.
• Downer Ending: Robot Wants Puppy (Kitty hates Puppy), Robot Wants Fishy (Kitty eats Fishy), and Robot Wants Ice Cream (Robot has no mouth with which to eat ice cream). Mind you, these endings are sad for the robot, but hilarious for anyone else.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Getting destroyed simply reforms Robot at his last checkpoint with a penalty applied to the ingame timer. Downplayed in It All, where dying a lot will result in a penalty to bonus Moneys received.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: In a nutshell, the robot wants whatever is mentioned in the title.
• Excuse Plot: Most of the games just have Robot going to some planet to find a friend, braving through obstacles and fighting enemies to navigate the levels. Y has No Plot? No Problem!. The only ones with a more involved plot are Ice Cream, where Robot fights off the Mekazoid invasion of Happy Ice Cream Planet complete with a twist at the end, and Justice, where Robot seeks to save the Durpoids from Emperor Tronk, but even those are still relatively light on plot. Robot Wants It All does contain a feature that allows you to collect data on enemies and gives backstory to a lot of stuff in the series, but it's all off-screen.
• Final Boss: In Ice Cream, you fight Tom Stone at the end. In Justice, you fight Tronk (but mostly 2-Pei) at the end.
• Gratuitous German:
  • Das Boxen from Fishy. It's not even correct German, since "das" is a singular article, and the German for "box" is Kasten anyway.
  • It returns in Ice Cream as the Überboxen, even more incorrect since there's only one of them, albeit with cyborg enhancements. But that's probably the point...
• Joke Item:
  • The Sekrit Item of Wonder in Puppy is hard to find, hard to collect, and gives you ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Except an achievement, and some Moneys in It All.
  • In Fishy, there is an item that can only be obtained after a big chain explosion, and it is literally nothing. A graphically represented "nothing" that you can collect, and does nothing whatsoever. "Sometimes an explosion is its own reward."
• Justified Extra Lives: It's implied that the Transmatter Computrons, which serve as standard Checkpoints, rebuild Robot from scratch every time he dies.
• Marathon Boss: Most bosses in Fishy, and Tom Stone/Kitty in Ice Cream.
• Metroidvania: Each game is set up so that certain passages or destinations are only accessible after obtaining the right upgrades.
• Nintendo Hard: Definitely. Luckily, getting hit or dying doesn't equal game over. It just adds more seconds to your completion time. In It All, dying a lot can bring down the amount of bonus gold you receive at the end of the map, but you can never have a negative amount of bonus gold.
• Non-Human Sidekick: The kitty and the puppy serve as this in various games.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: Zig-Zagged. Robot is this in the first two games, though Fishy, Y, and Justice have a shield powerup that absorbs one hit until a checkpoint is reached, and Ice Cream gives him three hearts to work with. It All lets you play any of the games with the Tank-Bot chassis, which can always survive one more hit than Robot's default chassis.
• Power-Up: Actual powerups in question vary from game to game, though some of them are universal, like the double jump.
• Punny Name:
  • Many of the bosses have wonderful/horrible pun names. Dungeon S. Crab, The Obtuse Angler, and Char-L07, just to name a few.
  • 50-Pei, 4-Pei, and you guessed it, 2-Pei in Justice.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Robot, Kitty, Puppy, Fishy, the Durpoids... that's not even counting the cute monsters.
• Sequential Boss: Some bosses will grow new lifebars when you so much as put a dent in their armour, with their forms showing their armour gradually being destroyed. Notably, the Final Boss of Ice Cream has five forms.
• Shout-Out:
  • The boss names, such as the robotic spider "Char-L07", or the "PAL-1000", a boss whose mainframes you need to hack with the HaXXoR skill to expose the central core, which looks like HAL's red sensor.
  • One item in Fishy is called "Dolemite Infusion" and makes your bombs more powerful. "Dolemite" was a tough metal featured in Futurama as one component of Bender's robot body.
  • One area in Fishy is called Bat Cave. It's a big cave full of bats.
  • Probably it's just a concidence, but when Robot hacks a computer in Fishy, their happy screens look just like Jailbot's dot matrix screen/face.
  • The ability to make Puppy attack in Ice Cream is called "Atomic Robo-Puppy". There was an old arcade game called Atomic Robo-Kid.
• Slow Laser: Whenever Robot can shoot "lasers", they're guaranteed to move rather slow.
• Super Drowning Skills/Super Not-Drowning Skills: Before collecting the Rustproofing or Aqualung upgrade in Fishy or Y, you die on contact with any water whatsoever. After collecting it, you can stay in water as long as you want. Justified since Robot is mechanical.
• Year X: Parodied. Puppy is set in 20XX, Fishy is set in "20XX and a couple of days", Ice Cream is set in "20XX and a week or two" (plus the ten-year nap Robot and Puppy have while travelling to Happy Ice Cream Planet), and Justice is set in 20XY. In It All, Robot Wants Data mentions that the Squiddle from Kitty was discovered in 20WR.
• Your Size May Vary: Kitty becomes a lot smaller in Puppy and Ice Cream than they were in Kitty. The same thing happens to Puppy in Ice Cream and Justice. Fishy is also a lot larger in Fishy Wants Robot from It All than in Fishy.

Robot Wants Kitty

• Big Bad: Slurg, Lord of Slime, is the leader of the Squiddles and other monsters standing in Robot’s way of getting Kitty.
• Disc-One Nuke: As you already have the horizontal thrusters when you meet Slurg, Lord of Slime, it is quite easy to rocket past him, grab the power-up for your laser-gun, and finish him off in a few seconds.

Robot Wants Puppy

• Armor-Piercing Attack: Dropping Stalacs on Blocko, the second boss, is the only way to decrease his health before his final form.
• Attack Animal: Throwing Kitty onto aliens until they're scratched to death becomes your main form of attack in this game.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Hoverzorg and Blocko are the bosses that block Robot’s way to getting Puppy.
• Excuse Plot: Parodied. The game opens describing an epic yet completely unrelated plot about a rebellion growing against Morgox the Unborn, who has enslaved the galaxy, ending with "Meanwhile, in a completely different galaxy, thousands of light years away, Robot wants puppy." (If you're patient, after a wide gap between paragraphs, the story backpedals to clarify a detail in the initial plot description.)
• Fake-Out Opening: The uprising against Morgox the Unborn has nothing to do with the actual game.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Downplayed. Although you attack by throwing Kitty, it's not the act of Kitty hitting an enemy that harms them - it's Kitty going nuts and scratching them.
• The Ghost: Morgox the Unborn.
• Improvised Weapon: Since Robot isn't given any powerups that allow him to directly attack, his only form of offense is throwing Kitty at enemies.

Robot Wants Fishy

• Big Bad Ensemble: The six bosses- Dungeon S. Crab, Das Boxen, the Obtuse Angler, Battle Bat, PAL-1000, and Drillbaby- stand in Robot’s way of getting Fishy.
• Bullet Hell: The Obtuse Angler fires spirals of bullets now and then that need to be carefully avoided.
• Dolled-Up Installment: Fishy was retooled into Pedro's Space Adventure 2, changing the main character into Pedro the Mailburro (the mascot of the Boy Scouts magazine Boys' Life) and replacing the Robo-Bombs with letters.
• Leet Speak: The name of the HaXXor skill.
• Underwater Boss Battle: The Obtuse Angler. To properly fight it, you need to collect a powerup that allows you to swim and a powerup that lets you shoot underwater.

Robot Wants Ice Cream

• Abnormal Ammo: By means of a secret upgrade which allows you to shoot bananas.
• Asteroids Monster: The Nanoswarm is an Asteroids Boss.
• Big Bad: Tom Stone is the leader of the invasion on the Happy Ice Cream Planet and is destroying it so he can steal all the ice cream for himself. Turns out he is actually Kitty in a mech, who wants revenge on Robot for abandoning him in response for his bad behavior.
• Create Your Own Villain: Tom Stone (Kitty) may not have liked being hurled at enemies in Puppy and ejected into space at the start of the game.
• The Dog Bites Back: Kitty. "This'll teach you to abandon me, Robot!"
• Face–Heel Turn: Kitty somehow ended up conquering Happy Ice Cream Planet and terrorizing it with missiles and hostile robots.
• Faceship: The Mekazoid spaceship is shaped like a cat head.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: While the Kitty was no slouch in Puppy, it largely undergoes a Humiliation Conga (being thrown by the Robot repeatedly into enemies and electrical fields, culminating in it being replaced by the Puppy once the Robot finds him). As a result, the character conducts a Great Offscreen War, taking over Ice Cream Planet and populating it with Mekazoids, a spaceship with plenty of defenses, and missiles raining down upon the surface.
• Great Offscreen War: How do you think Happy Ice Cream Planet was overtaken?
• Hope Spot: A single, solitary ice cream cone is placed a few feet in front of the Robot at the very beginning of the game... only to be cruelly blown apart by a strategically-placed missile moments afterwards.
• Lethal Joke Item: The hidden BANANARANG!! upgrade replaces Robot and Puppy's bolts with bananas. Extremely bouncy bananas that do no less damage than regular bolts.
• Necessary Drawback: The use of save stations has been greatly relaxed in the Compilation Re-release — while the original RWIC map made it so that you couldn't regenerate hitpoints (you had exactly three hits before you died), the re-release has it so that you can refill your hit points at any time simply by touching one of the stations... however, the drawback is that three seconds are added to the total time if you hit an enemy, while still factoring in the ten-second penalty if you die. As a result, the map is much harder for players trying to get the achievements for speedrunning, as they have to weigh the tradeoffs of getting hit versus completing the area as quickly as possible.
• Schmuck Bait: Getting two of the upgrades on the undercarriage of the Mekazoid spaceship requires the Robot to fly directly into an exploding enemy, which will cost it a hitpoint. There is no way to avoid it, as even the Bananarang secret weapon doesn't have the angle possible to shoot down the enemy (in a one-pixel tunnel) before it explodes.
• Sigil Spam: The letter K is imprinted on numerous bosses. As in, K for Kitty.
• Walking Spoiler: You can't mention Kitty playing a non-trivial role in the game without noting that they took over Happy Ice Cream Planet.
• Zerg Rush: Once the Nanoswarm breaks apart enough (and if the Robot hasn't fully upgraded its weaponry), it will attempt this, using dozens of smaller copies of itself.

Robot Wants Y

• EMP: The EMP Bombs are a standard depiction, disabling electronics (pistons and acid cannons) temporarily... and destroying Robot if he's in range.
• Fun with Acronyms: Every item in the game. That is, Crawly Bombs, Air Jump, Shield, Underminer, Actuator, Laser Blaster; Glidewings, Air Bombs, Mag-Lock, EMP Bombs, Plasma Bombs, Lateral Magnets, Aqualung, and YOU WIN!^note "Y? Because Robot wants it.".
• No Plot? No Problem!: Unlike previous games, this one does not even contain an Opening Scroll or try to justify why Robot is in a cave looking for giant letters- it just puts you in the game.

Robot Wants Justice

• Big Bad: Emperor Tronk has captured and enslaved the Durpoids and plans on eating them, with Robot setting out to stop him and his army.
• Continuity Nod: You can find one of the computer terminals from Fishy in one of the caves on the surface of the planet, a short time before you fight 2-Pei.
• Flash of Pain: Robot starts flashing red when he takes a hit with the External Plating upgrade.
• Grand Finale: The final game in the series. It has Robot going on his grandest adventure yet, and when it is all over, Robot decides to retire.
• Ground Punch: The "Seismic Slam" upgrade allows for this.
• Mordor: The Big Bad Emperor Tronk's planet is a lava planet, and it is the main setting, filled with Tronk's evil machines.
• Shoryuken: One of Robot's attack upgrades, only it's just called "Uppercut".

Robot Wants It All (spoilers)

Includes extra lore mentioned in the Robot Wants Data feature that is not made apparent in the games themselves.

• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Unlocking the variants of each map (Remix or Classic) unlocks certain alternate skins for the Robot to use, like the Safetybot (orange-and-yellow). Downplayed in that some skins have actual gameplay effects.
• As Himself: Somehow inverted in the credits. "As Himself" is played by Morgox the Unborn, the Villain of Another Story mentioned in Puppy.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Apparently, the bio for Bad Robot seems to consider the difference between good robots and bad robots being in what direction they move- good ones move (mostly) horizontally, bad ones move vertically.
  Much has been written on the philosophical implications of the Rocket Riser powerup.
• Call-Back: In the credits, the As Himself section lists Morgox the Unborn, the Villain of Another Story mentioned in the Opening Scroll of Puppy.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Tronk Industries, when producing the Constructipods, made it so that any violators of the EULA would be decapitated by the Copterbots.
• Double Unlock: The Shop menu is built around this. Playing any map results in enemies dropping Moneys and Moneys being rewarded upon completing the map, which can be spent on new features, alternate Robot costumes, and Mutators. However, not everything is immediately accessible - you'll need to purchase items to unlock more of them, making the Shop more akin to a Tech Tree.
• Endless Game: Robot Wants Mayhem only ends when Robot dies.
• Enemy Scan: Purchasing the Robot Wants Data bonus feature in the shop causes enemies to occasionally drop blueprints on death (or, in the case of Y, when being stunned). An enemy's description starts out obscured, and is gradually revealed as you collect more blueprints pertaining to that enemy.
• The Ghost: Almost everyone named in Robot Wants Data aside from the scanned entities themselves.
• The Great Offscreen War: The Solarium Wars, between the Felgax Horde and another enemy (possibly the Imperiax, another nation mentioned in the data entries), serve as backstory to some of the enemies and bosses, which were experimented on for purposes of the war. The Imperiax won, seeing as the Felgax were wiped out by the Zarps, who rebelled against the Felgax for trying to use them as disposable soldiers.
• Hanlon's Razor: Mentioned in reference to Emperor Tronk, only to be rebuked by saying he is both evil and stupid.
  Never attribute that to malice which can be adequately explained by incompetence. Of course, Tronk is equally incompetent and malicious, so really, just pick either one. If he's trying to be malicious, he'll probably screw it up, and if he's making a mistake, it's in the process of doing evil.
• Improvised Weapon:
  • The Copterbots were originally landscape robots before Tronk and his empire removed the safety cover from the rotating blades and turned them into weapons to be auctioned off.
  • Their successors, the Grapebots, were also indented as landscaping machines to use on grapevines, but the core was so unstable that the Felgax repurposed it as an antipersonnel mine.
  • The Deathbots were created by Tronk by taking industrial vacuums and sticking cannonballs in the tubes.
• Mecha-Mooks: The Cyberkrobbs were developed by Imperiax scientists to create robot Mooks because the organic Krobbs were too peaceful for war (though they originally wanted to convert Krobbs into Cyberkrobbs but decided on pure robots to save money).
• Mini-Game: A few of them in the Bonus menu.
  • Fishy Wants Robot is a roguelike where Fishy traverses a randomly generated cavern to rescue Robot.
  • Robot Wants Mayhem is an endless arena mode where Robot destroys Mekazoids until they destroy him.
  • Robot Warps Quickly is a Gradius-esque sidescrolling shooter.
• Non-Malicious Monster: The Snorks do not actually mean any harm to Robot- it's just that, since they are aquatic, being on land disrupts their respiratory system, resulting in them expelling acidic mucus that serves as a projectile.
• Perspective Flip: The Fishy Wants Robot bonus map places you in control of Fishy, who must rescue Robot in much the same way Robot rescued Fishy - except everything is underwater. It's non-canon, since Fishy dies at the end of Fishy, almost immediately after Robot finds her.
• [Popular Saying], But...: On the Evil Bots:
  And as the saying goes, evil cannot be stopped until you tear off its outer shell and blow its skeleton to pieces.
• Quintessential British Gentleman: The Krobbs (crab-like enemies in Fishy) are presented as a Planet of Hats with this trait.
  The Krobb is an extremely genteel creature. If it had a pinkie, it would stick it out when drinking tea.
• Redundancy Department of Redundancy: The Horror Beyond Comprehension is described as "a horror so horrifying that its horrific countenance cannot be described."
• Samus Is a Girl: Fishy is described as female in Fishy Wants Robot.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Fishy Wants Robot sidestory uses items and designs from Pedro and the Pearls of Peril, a separate game also developed by Hamumu Software. These include the oysters (which now confer powerups instead of pearls) and the Ghost Angler boss, who appears once all of the Chrono Shards have been collected.
  • Dying in Robot Wants Mayhem results in a YOU DIED screen, complete with a soundalike of the Dark Souls death sound.
  • The new enemy in the Puppy Remix level is called Psychomantis.
  • The Sonic Mine is said in the bio to have been created to destroy hedgehogs.
• Sliding Scale of Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • The Drippys, having only one eye, cannot aim their deadly energy orbs properly since they lack depth perception, so they just shoot at a constant rate.
  • The Murps having no shading is justified in-universe by their skin having bioluminescent cells activating in response to darkness.
  • Drillbaby's ground-pound attack, which dislodges Robot from the ceiling if he is standing upside-down, was intended as a way to shake debris loose from the ceilings of caves so it can be collected.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: Played for Laughs. The game insists you cannot possibly understand why there are deadly gray pistons everywhere in Y because "you are (I assume) a mere human."
• You Bastard!: The Squiddle bio humorously calls out the player for attacking and killing them, and the Dungeon S. Crab bio guilts you for killing a ruler who was chosen “in a test of manners so subtle and complex that we simply couldn’t understand it”.
  Squiddle Bio: They appear to need no sustenance and are as light as a feather. But you callously slaughter them regardless.
  Dungeon S. Crab Bio: But you just blew him up. Nice.

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Robot got tropes!

Robot's life is ruined!

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