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I played this somewhere in the early 90s, I think, downloaded off of a Bulletin Board System and played via a direct connection over the phone lines the twice I actually got to play. It might have been run on Windows 3.11, although that would have been the right timeframe for us to have moved on to Windows 95. The character plays a two-legged robot or mechsuit with weapons. I remember one of them was a laser gun that showed up as two lines that converged from akimbo arms to converge on a point in front of the player. Their opponent is another robot which differs only in color (I think red and blue?). They move around in a maze, trying to destroy each other. The game was in pseudo-3D, I think using layered sprites to represent the corridors. Movement was from space to space, and turning happened at 90 degree intervals. I can't remember what other weapons might have been used, although I want to say there was another weapon that was effective at a distance (missiles?), but was much slower, allowing for a bit of balance between trying to tag someone at the end of a hallway and then ducking away versus sneaking up and blasting away at them.

I don't remember much about the interface. I don't know if there was a map of the maze being displayed to help players find their way.

There was no real offline play, at least in the shareware version I played, with a completely inert opponent to be found and defeated.

I was trying to find a way to describe the graphics style, and came upon Maze Wars, which is kind of a direct predecessor to this game, with this one having similar gameplay, but a more limited amount of people participating, and somewhat advanced graphics.

Rough idea of what the robots were styled like

Image of a Mechwarrior Timberwolf

Like this, but colored, and only seen from front, back, and side views.

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  • One of the Mechwarrior games? youtube.com/watch?v=J7w88yQVlVY
    – Valorum
    Jan 10, 2021 at 10:19
  • @Valorum That's a sound idea, but it looks like those were already much further into actual 3d.
    – FuzzyBoots
    Jan 10, 2021 at 12:09
  • 1
    Many of the Mechwarrior/Battletech mechs were pretty blatant copies of vehicles from the anime Macross. Jan 10, 2021 at 13:19

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Thanks to Razmodian's answer, I was able to find the game, Megatron VGA.

Firing a laser in the maze A choice of robots

It is available to play online at the Internet Archive, which also has a better description:

In Megatron VGA the player sits in the cockpit of a large walking tank, similar to those from FASA's BattleTech universe.

The player can walk around in a first person perspective through maze-like environments similar in technical presentation to Eye of the Beholder (the player can only walk in fixed steps of a single 3D tile). Controlling multiple different weapons the player must destroy enemy mechs before they try the same. Separate shields on the front and back of the mech must protect players from getting destroyed instantly.

The player can choose between different mechs and multiple difficulty levels. A map of the level is shown at the bottom of the screen at all times, but the player can only detect the enemy when he's in radar range.

When I was searching for screenshots from Future Cop: LAPD, it brought me to myAbandonware.com, which had a tag for Battlemech games, so I scrolled through until I saw this one.

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