(So far, I've done the whole CPU section and most of the PPU section.)

It's a fun take on the good old Zachlike (and, more specifically, Silicon Zeroes), and I'm impressed by what it does. I'd encourage anyone who's curious to give it a try; for the price it's hard to complain.

..but. It feels like the game doesn't really know who it wants to be for.

On one hand, it *demands* that you're already comfortable with JavaScript. If you're not, the game doesn't really try to give you a footing to stand on.
On the other hand, the whole thing gets *really* hand-holdy. Almost all of the instructions are just "Change these lines, translating this bit of pseudocode into JavaScript". It's the stuff you'd tell a coworker when pair programming, not when trying to write a interesting puzzle game.

The game also has a pretty bad case of "library-itis" (for lack of a better word). It's always hard for a Zachlike to balance what to give users as a "free" baseline vs what to make (/help) users reinvent themselves. This game has an unusual starting point (you're emulating an existing real-world architecture using an existing real-world language that isn't *particularly* well-suited for that job), and overcompensates for that by occasionally just dumping libraries on you. Sometimes it's "hey, you can use this bespoke bit-twiddling library instead of masking yourself", sometimes "copy/paste this 20 line function that I gave you into your code". I recently even ran into a case (PPU scrolling) where the game taught me the *wrong way* to do something, didn't show me why it didn't work, and just said "okay now rip all of that out and use this library instead". Meh.

And adjacently, the game is *very* peculiar about code structure, from "you must structure your code in this [honestly kind of spaghetti-y] way" to "you must name your methods exactly this". On some level, that makes sense! You can't provide me with unit tests if you don't know the shape of the units!

But it also leaves me feeling like I haven't learned to write *an* emulator, I've just learned how to type @afska's emulator. Which, to be fair, is still better than where I started off. But still.

I really wish Steam had a "meh" option. I don't *want* to be writing the first negative review of the game. It's not a bad game! But the caveats are still heavy enough that I can't just recommend it either.

Honestly, the premise is great and it can really ignite an interest in programming for the right person, but like others have said, there are a few issues that make it not the *best* option.

For one, it's teaching (ostensibly) you to create an emulator from scratch using... Javascript? Sure, JS is everywhere and everyone is using it, but it's not the only language out there and it's not even a good language to use for something like this. If you were a brand new programmer and didn't know anything about the field, you would be given the wrong idea about when to use which language. Not that JS can't run an emulator (one of the most popular ones right now is written in JS), but it just isn't the right choice.

Of course, that's assuming you are new to programming, which you can't really be since the game requires a certain level of JS experience coming into it. You need to not only know programming concepts, but how to implement those within JS (which again, is not that good for some things).

Then you get into the actual writing. First off, the game is split into a console and text editor, but you cannot resize them or close the console. So if you are using third party resources in your browser (which you WILL be doing), you either need to have your screen split three ways because you have no way to relocate or close the game's console UI, or you will be alt-tabbing between the browser and editor constantly. Good luck seeing your own code if you don't have an ultrawide monitor.

The game also forces you into writing the code in a very specific way. Your internal names cannot be something that makes sense to you, they have to always match the the dev's naming and formatting. The actual code writing is more along the lines of "rewrite my code exactly as I originally wrote it" and less along the lines of "learn how to make this product".

It's not bad, necessarily. It just isn't as polished as it appears to be on the surface. This is an area I've been interested in for a long time and I'm genuinely sad that such a promising idea just isn't executed all that well, like most games of its type.

I remember when I first opened the beta version I spent 4 or 5 hour sessions palying through the weekend. It was already addictive and it was not half of what it is now.
It's a great, solid game.
You can tell it's made with lots of love and attention to detail, you know. It just shows. I had never played a game like this before and I've found it to be quite easy-going for the level of complexity it envolves.
The audio and video sections are so good!
I will not talk about the background music, I'll let you judge youselves.

You will want more games like this.