Overall most helpful review

Posted on: July 20, 2015

pbl64k

Games: 565 Reviews: 2

Zach Barth Strikes Again*

* the review is based on the Steam version of TIS-100 If you're not a programmer, you might not like this game. It is a wall of undecipherable text staring back at you, daunting and immense. It is abstract, it's totally divorced from reality as you know it. It's a different reality, dark and soul-crushing. To say it challenges you to go toe-to-toe with it would be like saying that Sauron challenges Frodo. The very notion is ridiculous. If you're a programmer, you might not like this game. It is the same thing you're doing every day 9-to-5. Only without the comforts of an IDE and a high-level language. It's a throwback to the horrible times when messily bearded men and women hacked at their ridiculously underpowered machines with their hexadecimal debuggers and little else. (Stone axes? Loincloths?) If it's not the Stone Age of computing, it is not far removed from it. If, however, programming and computer science are a passion rather than a trade for you, you might want to check it out. If you can't resist a puzzle that dares you to create and invent rather than reverse engineer, you might want to check it out. If you liked SpaceChem and/or Infinifactory, for Turing's sake, stop reading and click that damn button! There might be a tiny chance you won't like it. But the risk is negligible. It is the purest version of Zachtronics Formula to date. It's largely black-and-white. And essentially text-based. It's about stream processing and parallelization and all sorts of scary words like that. It hates you in any number of very subtle ways. It can deprive you of sleep and destroy your life. And the story (wait, story?! -- yes!) is creepy as hell. For all I know, Zach probably did it on a bet. ("Surely we can't sell THAT!") It is brilliant. It's gorgeous. It's my Game of the Year, and probably of the decade. I don't know whether I can recommend it to *you*, but hopefully I've helped you make your decision.

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Posted on: July 22, 2015

rtcvb32

Verified owner

Games: Reviews: 15

Reminds me of the x86 Assembly Language

When i was a teenager (14 or so) i spent a lot of time doing assembly language programming (enough to write a small compiler). Most of the instructions are similar and playing/programming felt like slipping on some old comfortable slippers i'd forgotten. It helps that it starts up and feels like an old DOS computer from the 1980's. Suggested you read the manual first, the TIS-100 has 10 instructions for you to use and master. They are relatively easy, but in combination with the puzzles you can seriously do a lot more than you'd ever thought you could. Add to that you have each processor working in parallel so you can have one doubling a number while the other one gets you the difference of it before passing it to the output. One of the hardest puzzles include making a sorting routine with such limited space for instructions and logic. But don't worry most of the puzzles slowly ramp up in difficulty helping you build the tools needed to solve later problems. Hidden in each puzzle is a broken processor which stores a dairy of sorts which is the story, of the growing obsession that your uncle had of the machine. Reading it is interesting but not required for play. If you are having trouble with the puzzles, it might be worth it to go to YouTube and watch some videos on computer programming fundamentals which would explain the high level logic of how some of this stuff works, then condense it to the problem at hand. Perhaps the biggest downside to the game is the total lack of music. But if you put something on in the background, it will be much easier for you to play. If you want to try programming in general, or are a programmer, i'd recommend this; If you can't use the BASIC's PRINT command in old Apple/Atari computers then you might give this a pass.

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Posted on: August 19, 2015

xkr88

Verified owner

Games: 894 Reviews: 3

More like a challenge than an exercise

The game is not a classic programming game. It mainly challenges you with the minimalistic instruction set. It is not a bad thing as a game, but be aware that it plays more like an assembly programming challenge than a learn how to program/ get some programming experience tool. The game is really different from how programming goes this times, or even 20 or 30 years ago. But as a challenge, it is quite fine, and I think it worth the money.

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Posted on: March 27, 2016

creadproj

Verified owner

Games: 83 Reviews: 1

interesting computer architecture

The TIS-100 computer system contains many CPU-cores which continually repeat a fifteen instruction long assembler program. These cores can only communicate with their four neighbours and have two registers. Programming for the TIS-100 is often a struggle against the code size, the topological constraints of communicating or the limited register count. Longer programs could often easily fulfil the puzzle-specific program-specification but can't even be temporarily written in the primitive editor. Maybe the TIS-100 architecture can be best compared to distributed message-passing programs running on a biological computer. At first I found the game to be a fun distraction from "normal" programming but later on I did no longer want to miss the comforts of modern programming languages and environments. If you want to learn programming you should not start with this game as it is probably highly frustrating. However learning assembly programming with TIS-100 might work out rather well due to the extremely limited instruction set.

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Posted on: December 30, 2015

benjijohnson

Verified owner

Games: 166 Reviews: 12

Really clever if you get into it

Extremely clever and well done puzzle game, but one with a pretty brutal learning curve. You don't need to know programming languages, but need to be able to think with computer logic (breaking down a problem into steps and implementing those steps with the game's stripped-down programming language.) Once you get the hang of it, the puzzles are tricky enough to give you some satisfaction for beating them, without being so hard that you can't make headway against them. TIS-100 draws a lot of comparisons to the other recent programming puzzle game, Human Resource Machine. HRM's easier to learn and prettier, but I found it much more frustrating at times - it had easier puzzles that were only hard because the commands you had to work with were very limited. TIS gives you a lot more flexibility but requires more flexible, clever thinking to beat some of its challenges.

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