Last week I had to meet a customer in Orange County California. I decided that this was too close to San Francisco not to take advantage of this trip and take a detour into the 2009 Robo Games Experience, and so I did. Thursday June 11, 2009 I landed in San Francisco Airport and drove to the busy city.
On Friday morning I went to Weird Stuff surplus store. (www.weirdstuff.com) This is an awesome place if you are in the area and are looking for goodies. I was impressed at the humongous amount of stuff they had, but most importantly with their prices. When it comes to pricing, this is the dream surplus store. Their theme seems to be “I have too much junk in here, please help me get rid of it”. Whereas some other surplus stores’ theme is “My junk may be your treasure so either way, bend over”. I spend $24 and bought much more stuff than I could haul on my luggage, but that is not the main topic of this posting.
Robo Games was a good hour away from Weird Stuff, so at 10:45 I had to cut my shopping spree short. Luckily, the road into San Francisco was pretty clear and I managed to get into the place a few minutes before 12:00 PM. And then depression set in.
Let me give you some advice. If you want to go to Robo Games, try to make it into Saturday. It is my impression that since most people work on Fridays, this is not the best day to go to the competition. The place was almost deserted and it was not until 1:00 PM that there was something to see. Luckily, shortly after, about 2:00 PM, the mayhem started and the slash and bash comenced into the next four hours before I had to go back to the airport. No need to bore you with words as I have a video depicting the most intense moments.
NOTE: The first battles, those of feather weight division robots, are not very destructive. But as weight increased, the excitement grew out of proportion! My apologies for not being able to hold the camera still during the deadliest blows, but I was having a hard time picking up my jaw as it dropped through the blitchers.