SHENZHEN I/O

I am now a better programmer.

The whole game is about putting the right cards in the right order. Not too difficult once you got the hang of it but very fun nontheless. There is also some minigame which is about programming microcontrollers, but who would ever look at this? Jokes aside: This is a typical Zach Barth...Easy start but pretty soon you are like "What?" with the usual statistics screen in the end displaying your inferior creativity and intellect.

I had fun playing this game, it is fun trying to figure out how to write the assembly language small enough to fit in the microprocessors (there is a 14 instruction limit on the MC6000 and a 9 instruction limit on the MC4000). It can at times be frustrating to try and solve the problems, and the datasheets are sometimes not detailed enough (which is far too realistic). At least on the Linux, the game can take far too much of the processor. Unless I limit it with taskset it uses as much as it can of all the cores on my Intel i7-6500U cpu. (All to simulate and display some microprocessors that would be outclassed by a 1977 General Instrument PIC1650.)

Info: didn't play this very far yet at all (might pick it up again at some point). I bought this game some time after playing TIS-100, which I finished and spent extra time on, and loved very much. This game adds a lot of graphical bells and whistles - aaand: a social background of sorts, with boss, colleagues, emails and such, which I find rather boring, at times *very* clichéd, and exhausting at the same time. Can't tell yet whether the machine language / system architectures in here are better or more interesting than in the other game. To me personally, TIS-100 had an almost mystical atmosphere and Shenzhen IO was just not very engaging by comparison, and thus I just stopped playing after a short time. After writing this, I am motivated to fire up TIS-100 again, though :)

The game starts with your new carreer as embedded designer in China. In the game environment you'll receive emails from colleagues just like in the office. These contain assignments from the boss as well various comments from your colleagues. The daughter of the boss has designed a solitaire game, which is made available early on in the game. Also that game is very solid, it's hard to master. The assignments are simple in concept: a tosti maker for various types of tosti's, a kitchen scale etc. These assignments would be a walk in the park for any programmer with a normal IDE. But since this is actually a puzzle game, there's a catch: The processors in the game are utterly limited, which forces you to think very hard to achive a certain solution. All code is visibile at all times, because the processors simply support 9 or 13 lines of code (so no scrollbar) and only have 1 or two registers. Soon, you'll realize that these cannot support the last part of the assignment, because you either need to store more values or that last line of code doesn't fit. After various retries the final solution is usually with half the hardware and far less lines of code. Once the assignment has been resolved, you'll soon realize that others achived it with even less hardware costs and less lines of code :). In total: great puzzles, a good number of puzzles (no spoiler here), great atmosphere and it looks good too. 5 stars!