Recent reviews by invitro

I stink at writing reviews but I'll try for this one. This game is about writing small assembly language programs in a tiny instruction set with a minuscule amount of memory. Making a working program is not too hard for most of the puzzles, but optimizing them is extremely hard. I've apparently played this 171 hours, and I haven't finished all the puzzles yet, let alone optimized them, so there is an enormous amount of value.

This is similar to Human Resource Machine, but quite a bit harder, much much longer, less visually produced (though still very attractive), and with somewhat different instruction sets and restrictions on memory use that make programs quite a bit different.

TIS-100's main difference from standard assembly, other than the restrictions, is its quasi-parallel programming focus. This is the game's chief conceit and it does play a huge role in the programs. You will learn the main strategies for getting the twelve processors to work together, and to send data and signals between them, by playing the first several levels.

I highly recommend this game for anyone who enjoys programming. It's very challenging, and I hope that TIS-200 includes a larger instruction set and a way to define named subroutines that can be accessed from any program.