I have no face and I must bark. View Slideshow Sure, we'd all like to own a robot – to do our homework, to exchange quips with our moisture vaporators, to infiltrate our ragtag fleet of exiled starships – but they're so goshdamned expensive. The Honda Asimo, for instance, costs a million dollars to make and they still haven't figured out how to keep the "v" attached to the end of its name. Even a low-end Roomba costs a hundred bucks, and my cat-frightener budget doesn't go that deep.

Luckily, capitalism has a cure for this, as it does for everything except capitalism. We're lucky enough to live in what future generations will no doubt call the Cheap Plastic Robot Age. To be fair, these aren't all robots in the scientific sense of "a machine designed to replicate the complicated behaviors of human beings," but rather the marketing sense of, "You know, a robot! Like, a future thing, but cute. And it should have silver parts." For the next three weeks, I will be taking a look at robots you can buy for 30 bucks or less. So sit back and enjoy a cut-rate slice of steaming future.

Idog

I'm convinced that robots will never conquer civilization, because we will never get them out of their packaging. This "robotic pooch" has enough wires and pieces of tape holding it in place to satisfy the bondage needs of an extremely kinky rhinoceros.

Once freed, it resembles a collision between a bag of marshmallows and a cell phone, with vague canine overtones. The main problem is that it lacks a face, making it look like one of those deformed baby animals that are so popular on Boing Boing these days. Once you get the batteries into it, a flower-shaped array of colored lights substitutes for a face. This is not an improvement.

The conceit with this strange little creature is that you "feed" it music, and it responds appropriately. I immediately set it up with an IV drip of '80s New Wave music, and it responded by tilting its head, wiggling its ears, and blinking its many colorful, spiderlike eyes at random. This is, remarkably, the usual response I get from people when I play Kajagoogoo. When I paid closer attention, the color patterns and head spasms seemed to have a vague relationship to the music, but I think with another beer I could have convinced myself they had a vague relationship to the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

The thing is supposed to develop a personality based on what music you play through it. The instruction book says the music I played for it caused it to develop a "rap/hip-hop" personality, so I imagine it will be getting into a shootout with my pencil sharpener pretty soon.

How it could make your life easier: You can send it to a rave in your stead, saving you money on smartdrinks and E and letting you get some work done.

Shooter Bots: The Game

I like that little "the game" there. Because someday there's going to be Shooter Bots: The Movie and Shooter Bots: The Novelization of the Movie and you don't want people to be confused. Shooter Bots is like Lazer Tag, only you don't have to have any friends. Instead, there's a robotic tank and a futuristic gun you can shoot it with. The tank tries to shoot you too, so it's less of a friend than a co-worker.

Anyhow, we had a quick fight and it used some clever tactics like bouncing its little tank light off of a well-varnished drawer to hit me in the gun, and running under the couch and attempting to procreate with a universal remote I lost under there. And hey, it won!

Toward the end, I considered using the tactic of hiding the gun behind my back, but I felt that would be cheating. In true robot form, the Shooter Bot was not encumbered by my weak human notions of fair play and was able to take me down with cold logic and hot infrared.

How it could make your life easier: It should adequately protect you from burglars with plastic, battery-powered guns.

Next week: more robots

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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become an electrical engineer, a software engineer and a train engineer.

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