How many of you know about Robopon? If you're shaking your head and wondering what I'm talking about, then don't worry, because there will be thousands of other gamers just like you. Releasing a game like Pokémon at the same time as the Pokémon franchise was taking off and Pokémon Gold and Silver were capturing the hearts and minds of gamers everywhere was, to be quite honest, madness. Still, Atlus & Hudson Soft released Robopon Sun, Star, and Moon versions anyway.
Players control a character named Cody who must travel around his island collecting Robopon and using them to battle 7 ranked fighters. It's essentially the same premise as Pokémon, except you capture robot monsters rather than Pikachu and his pals.
If you've never seen the Robopon cartridges, they're anything but standard. They had infrared capabilities so that you could use your standard TV remote to open chests in the game. The whole thing was a little convoluted and designed to give a bit of extra interest to make people put down Pokémon and pick up Robopon, but it never took off.
America only ever got Robopon Star, while Japan got all three versions. We never got any of them over here in the UK, and because of the nature of the cart and mapper, it wasn't possible to get the files to play on a flash cart in any region so that we could experience them on proper hardware because of the Hudson-designed HUC-3 mapper.
Thanks to RetroSix's Luke, however, Robopon Sun and Star versions can now be played using an Everdrive X7 or an MBC-3 cartridge (insideGadgets). This will mark the first time that Robopon Star can be played in the US on original hardware, and both games can be played in the EU. Luke's MBC-3 patch allows both Sun and Star to be played with the same real-time clock functionality and link cable trading as the original games.
None of the infrared functions work, however, but that's not something I'm worried about. I don't carry a TV remote around with me when I'm gaming on the go anyway, so I don't think I'll miss it. Head to the project pages for Robopon Sun and Robopon Star to get Luke's patches and for more information!
