 Snastro! Take a second and search YouTube for Super Nintendo hidden gems. Go ahead, I'll wait. You may have noticed that there are seemingly hundreds of these freaking videos. How many hidden gems could there possibly be? And what does hidden gem actually mean, anyway? I see some people calling uniracers a hidden gem. Okay, first of all, this game is average at best, and what makes for okay entertainment with its multiplayer aspect, but hidden? What is hidden about this game? It had its own commercial, for fuck's sake. It's time for action triple flip, back in the pit! It appears then to be totally slapping. Not only was it somewhat popular at the time, but I still see people talking about it regularly on retro message boards and such. Okay, enough lining. The point of this video is to point out the very definition of the term hidden gem. It's the game robo track. This game was literally hidden from North American audiences because they changed the name and the box art from its original Japanese title, Slapstick. I guess they thought Slapstick wasn't a name that would sell in North America, so they changed it to the totally generic sounding robo track and changed the cover art to some vague looking mechanical thing? And guess what? It still didn't sell. That's really a shame because the game is a lot of fun. It's a lighthearted, not so serious RPG. It's pretty short for an RPG too, and so it's a nice change of pace from the sometimes heavy, overwrought landscape of old school role-playing games. The character is the son of an inventor, aspiring to be an inventor himself, so you build and program robots to fight these monsters. It plays sort of like a proto-pokemon, only without all the collecting stuff. I really like the customization the game offers. It lends itself to a lot of different possibilities. You can make your robot like a tank, big, strong, and slow, or you can make a quick strike machine that enables a bunch of attacks in a row. Programming your own custom special attacks is also very cool. There's also a combination process to help create weapons and to level them up. It reminds me of how the Dark Cloud series eventually ended up being. Before one, though, there's a lot of grinding in a robot track, but the battles don't take too long, and besides, messing with the robot to come up with new and different ways to beat enemies is kind of addicting, and I like it. The story involves a once-peaceful planet that's staving off a revolution from these guys called hackers. They want this powerful stone called the Tetron that allows a person to travel through time. It's up to you and your robot army to stop them. Don't make too much of this story. It's told with a lot of levity, and it doesn't take itself seriously at all, which is a good thing. I will say this, this game can be tough to get into at first. It's one of the few Super Nintendo games where it really does help to either have the instruction book or to watch a walk-through on YouTube or something. Once you get the hang of it, though, of how to do things, the game is a blast. The music in Robotrack also isn't the greatest. The battle music gets old pretty quick. I know battle music gets old in pretty much every RPG, that's just how it is, but in Robotrack it gets kind of annoying almost right away. The music in the rest of the game is just okay, it's nothing too memorable. There are also some pretty blatant translation issues as well, but nothing that derails the game or anything. It's not as bad as, like, Secret of the Stars or anything like that, but it is noticeable. Otherwise, Robotrack really does fit the very definition of the term hidden gem. If you're looking for a forgotten RPG for the Super Nintendo, you should definitely give this one a try. It's a funny game that doesn't take itself seriously, with an addicting battle system where you control a lot, and it doesn't take too much of your time.