Comet 64

Really nice and aesthetic programming game! Only sad thing is that the commands are limited to what they tell you in the manual... and it's not a whole lot. HOWEVER... I think that it is a good game for people who are just getting into programming and such but don't really know a whole lot about it!

After a long day of coding for a living, it's really great to be able to kick back and relax by using code to solve challenges.

Fun assembly type game. If you like other assembly games you'll like this one.

The puzzles took me about 5 hours in total to solve. It would probably take quite a bit longer to get all optimization stars, but I don't plan to do so. I do Advent of Code puzzles as a pastime, so I don't know if I would be the target demographic. I didn't find the puzzles all that difficult. The primary issue is not the algorithm itself, but trying to implement it with such an incredibly limited language and VM. Extremely few registers, no variables, etc... You do get a fairly nice debugger, allowing you to step through a program as it executes, set break points, and so on. I think without those tools (programming "in the dark" so to speak) it would be much, much harder. Pacing seems good. The bonus levels (the A: and B: disks) can all be cheesed very simply using a technique that would be familiar to competitive programmers, but I won't go into that here to prevent spoilers. It would probably be more fun to ignore that technique in favor of coordinate tracking (which is described in the instruction manual). My only criticism is the lack of any kind of story. The store page makes it sound as though there is some narrative that unfolds as you get further and further in, but there is none. The ending content is .... minimalistic. If that's what you want - some fun, highly restrictive programming puzzles - this is great. If you want to solve things and along the way have new mysteries revealed, then this is probably not the game for you. I can see this as a good "intro to assembly language" experience, since you get familiar with manually managing state, creating WHILE loops by using GOTO equivalents, and so on. Having the optimization targets be both lines of code (code golf) AND total instructions executed (performance optimization) also help toward this goal. It made me appreciate FOR loops, advanced iterators, and higher-order-functions. Not being allowed to use variables really drives home how nice they are. :-)

I got this wanting some more zachtronics-style coding puzzles. This is [i]almost[/i] what I'm looking for. The programming language/ide this game makes you use is annoying to use. The most annoying thing it does is force you to end every line with a semicolon. It's really annoying when you are stepping through your program, and you're just about to hit the line you want, and [i]then[/i] it tells you there's a missing semicolon. Because the language is completely interpreted line by line, this and other things like it just increases the number of iterations you make on the code. It would be way more tolerable if the ide highlighted what's wrong before you run it, or at least don't start executing without parsing the entire program. There are other things that make it just feel tedious and not fun. - no "+=", but provides "++" for some reason - the bool register is read-only; there's no boolean operations. if you want behavior that toggles a branch on each loop you have to do something like this every iteration: ``` int = int * -1; check int > 0; ``` - Can't cast a bool into a number 1 or 0. - The in game documentation is ok i guess. - The syntax of the language implies that expressions can be evaluated as values, and then stored in registers. This is almost true with the exception of the `output` register. You can't do `output = int + reg`, you have to do `int = int + reg; output = int;`. - chars and numbers can't be implicitly cast, you have to manually cast them with a separate instruction eg `int = char` or vice versa. - you can't use string indexing syntax in a check, eg `check str[int] = str[reg]` is invalid The most interesting instruction is probably `return`, because it lets you make functions kinda sorta. That's about it. Maybe I haven't gotten far enough to figure out some of the more interesting tricks, or any undocumented secret instructions. It's like a death by a thousand cuts. All of these things are minor, and you could argue they help set the mood for the game. But in zachtronics games, all the limitations imposed don't feel like anything is being intentionally left out of the language.

me brain hurts

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Amazing simple puzzle game with exceptional interface. I love everything about it including the fact it's basically using java script which is the only language I started to learn.

One of the best i ever played

If math and puzzles give you peace you will love it.