Dylan Greene dot com

I, ROBOT

Book (Amazon)

By Isaac Asimov

Comments: It's the original story. I read it some time in elementary school and didn't really get it. It's basically a bunch of short stories that explain why robots must follow the three laws. The picture on the front is kinda cool. I wish I had it on my Trapper Keeper back then.

My rating:
/5

ICH, DER ROBOT

Book, German Translation

by Isaac Asimov

Comments: The retro robot killing machine on the cover is kinda cool. You have to remember that back then robot killing machines used literally hundreds of D cell batteries. These would weight the robot down and add to the overall bulk. This extra bulk gave these retro robots an inferiority complex, which is what eventually lead many of them to become evil killing machines.

My rating:
/5

I, ROBOT

Game

Atari

Comments: I never played this game, but according to the flier for this game, "I, ROBOT is easy to learn, not so easy to master." I think they are hinting that, as a human, you will never be the robot's master. There many other great quotes in the informational flier (Front, Back, Inside Left, Inside Right). You should print out the pages and post them around your desk. It will make you look busy and smart.

An interestingly unique fan site dedicated to the Atari game claims in the first paragraph that "it turned out to be one of Atari's biggest bombs and it did not sell well," but I think he meant that this game was da bomb!

My rating:

/5

Abissi d'acciaio
Il sole nudo
I robot dell'alba
I robot e l'impero

Book, Italian Translation

by Isaac Asimov

Comments: I've always been told not to judge a book by its cover, but since I can't read Italian, the cover is the only thing I have to go by. As you can see, this cover has a great looking naked chick on the cover. If there's anything America is missing out on, it's naked chicks on the covers of the sci-fi books. Not since Heavy Metal in 1981 have geeks gotten this close to a drawn naked chick.

My rating:
/5 (Perfect score!)

I, ROBOT

Movie (IMDB)

Wil Smith, Bridget Moynahan

Comments: The story has basically nothing in common with anything else I reviewed. It's a whole new story! So is it a good one? I enjoyed it. It was paced well, it was a murder mystery in addition to being an action flick, and it didn't try to be more than it was (a summer action movie). The special effects were amazing, mainly because the robots always looked like real robots, and not computer animation or faked robots. The "future" was well presented, with the sort of things we could realistically expect 30 years from now.

There was a major problem though: The robots are trying to kill Will Smith's character, and they suck at it! They never work together or form any kind of strategy. I would think a computer-assisted brain could do better.

Overall, it was so good I might even buy the DVD, if nothing else, but to see how they did the special effects and to support more movies from Asimov's work.

/5 (Since it's not in the same class as the others, I used C3-PO's instead of R2-D2s. If you think that's just too geeky, well, damn, you got me there.)