Chaos 2 and Wheely Big Cheese were my favourites, in fact virtually every flipper robot (except Dantomkia).
Best battle is a tricky one to call. Hypno-Disc vs Splinter was pretty sweet. Chaos 2 vs Wild Thing was great too though. I think the format of mandatory assault courses and sumos in the first two seasons worked really well, shame 95% of the robots were rubbish!
When did it stop? I didn't realised they stopped airing it, partly because I haven't watched it for a while. It was awesome when it lasted.
Just noticed I never responded to this. The final season, the seventh wars, finished in 2003. There wasn't any formal announcement, just a small message on the website. Ratings had plummeted in the final season due to a variety of reasons. These included the show switching from BBC to Channel 5, where it now had ad breaks. Phillipa Forrester was replaced as pit reporter by the far less popular Jayne Middlemiss. Several of the all-star robots dropped out, including Razer, Chaos 2, Hypno-Disc, Dominator 2, S3, Terrorhurtz and Wild Thing. Those that remained, such as Bigger Brother, Firestorm, Tornado, Dantomkia, Spawn Again, Thermidor 2, Pussycat and Panic Attack, performed distinctly worse that was expected from their reputations, and most were taken out early by novice robots (Bigger Brother, former finalist, being taken out in the 2nd round of it's heat was probably the biggest surprise).
Then there was the issue of, what I would say was a rather flukey final. The eventual champion Typhoon 2 only worked when it's spinning body was up to speed, so it would run away first to get up to speed, and rightfully so, because 8 of the 9 robots it fought against that season had flippers. It could have been eliminated in the first round when it was flipped over by Bigger Brother, who had already eliminated the other two robots, saving both of them. They beat Storm 2 in the final because Storm 2 sustained self-inflicted damage from hitting the arena wall so hard, other than that, Storm 2 were on top for the whole fight, and should have won it, as that thing was pretty much unstoppable.
