Stack-Up

Titlescreen

Stack-Up is the rarer of only two titles that were developed to be used in conjunction with the Nintendo R.O.B. (Robotic Operating Buddy) accessory. R.O.B. was essentially a marketing trojan horse that convinced retailers to stock the NES in the United States where video games were seen as a passing fad. Without the toy connection, stores would not consider purchasing another video game system that they believed was doomed to failure.

In Stack-Up, the player uses Professor Hector (along with second player Professor Vector) to direct R.O.B. The player's goal is to move the blocks arranged on the block trays from the current state to the goal state depicted on the screen. The player does this by getting the Professor to jump on buttons that correspond to commands that R.O.B. interprets and executes. There is very little oversight done by the game as to whether the player's plan actually succeeds in creating the goal state, and as such, the player is the only one who determines if the stage was completed or not.

A complete Stack-Up comes packaged with two foam hands for R.O.B., five block trays that are arranged around R.O.B.'s base, and five colored blocks (red, blue, yellow, green, and white). In the United States, R.O.B. was packaged with Gyromite, but in Japan, he was actually included with Stack-up, which was known as Block Set. As a result, Stack-Up is a harder to come by than Gyromite. The Stack-up cartridge also contains one of the highly sought after Famicom-to-NES converters since the ROM was never converted to the NES cartridge format.

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  Famicom Block Set

How to play

R.O.B. set up for Stack-Up

The goal of all of the one player games is to get the stack to look as it does in the initial or current state to look as it does in the goal state. In the two-player Bingo mode, each player must compete to get the most number of blocks on their side. In order to direct R.O.B. to move the blocks, you must provide him with one of six instructions. The method that those instructions are given differs slightly between each mode of play. The instructions are as follows:

	Left / Right	R.O.B.'s arms are capable of moving to one of five positions laterally. Each position corresponds to a particular tray positioned underneath his hands. Each position is labeled 1 through 5, in order from left to right.
	Up / Down	R.O.B.'s arms are capable of moving to one of six positions vertically. When the blocks are stacked in a single column, the arms are only capable of clearing the top block at the sixth and highest position. The blocks are perfectly sized such that each of the remaining positions corresponds to one particular block position.
	Open / Close	R.O.B.'s arms are capable of squeezing together in the closed position or spreading apart in the open position. When asked to closed, the hands will wrap around a block if one is positioned at that level. The foam hands helps R.O.B. grip the blocks as they tend to slip out without the hands.
	End	Only available in the Memory mode of game play. This button is the signal to Professor Hector that the sequence of instructions for R.O.B. has been completed. Hector will stop jumping, so any instructions that occur after the first END will be ignored.