Plot:
You are on a space station on Europa, a moon of Jupiter. Your job is programming robots to explore the surface of the moon. In your spare time, you build and program tiny versions of these same robots to compete in races, battles, and sports on the floor of the space station.
Gameplay:
It is a robot programming game -- you start with a chassis (hovercraft, wheeled, or treaded). You add components, like engines, sensors, and weapons, to your chassis. Then, you use a visual wiring system to program the vehicle. The programming model is event-driven, which is to say that each wire fires when something happens on one end of it, and the wire makes a change on the other end.
Each robot is programmed for a specific scenario. The scenarios range from battles to sports to races to puzzles. Various components are sometimes useful, sometimes useless, and occasionally disallowed.
Technical:
MindRover was developed by CogniToy. The visual wiring system is translated by the game into ICE, which is a programming language developed by CogniToy. The game compiles ICE code and runs it -- so if you don't want to use the visual wiring interface, you can write the ICE code yourself. ICE is also used in the game to program the behavior of the scenarios, vehicles, and components, so the game is very expandable in that way. CogniToy's website is http://www.cognitoy.com and you can find information about ICE programming at http://www.cognitoy.com/twiki .