Senaste recensioner av geoelectric

I don’t know how this could be possibly marked Verified on Steam Deck. It has profound frame rate issues unless you put in command line options from ProtonDB to disable cores, and even then it runs pretty badly. I realize I have very little time on it, but it doesn’t take long to discover the frame rate varies between 10 and 25.

I like the game itself and have it on several other platforms. I’d recommend it on the basis of both the unusual story with nicely morbid narrative touches, and the fun shuffleboard style combat. But if you have a Steam Deck, this will not run well for you.

I like it quite a bit on Switch, but I find it unplayable with Steam Deck trackpad controls. I’m very surprised it’s marked Verified given that it’s a time trial game. It needs game controller support, or to be reclassified Playable.

It's pretty much Fights in Tight Races--take FITSpaces and make the agents combat cars instead. The tactical grid and the card capabilities are very similar--cards might move you UDLR some pattern of squares, then let you either hit or move into something next to you in some sort of target pattern. The challenge is lining enemies up while staying inaccessible.

Totally the same thing here.

But here, car parts are your equipped gear and fundamentally change your deck when installed--each has a set of cards that swaps out with them. You can do this before any round, so you essentially get a meta-deck full of sidebars. Equipment is stored, and you can build up a versatile arsenal and strategize.

And the fights themselves are dynamic too, with lane modifiers timing in at any moment. You also can't always use all of your cards because gear changes are essentially modal stances, and not all cards work in all gears.Staying in the right powerband is part of the game too.

FITS is my favorite deckbuilder out right now, and this is pushing that same button, plus adding just a bit more chaos. And the Car Wars ambiance is spot on. I love it!

The mandatory semicolons constantly tripping me up (not to mention being awkward when mixed with the label colons) was indeed the first thing to take the shine off the game for me. It's incredibly arbitrary, since I don't recall using those an awful lot in my old ASM code.

In general, though, I think the problem is I'm just not having fun.

I can't define what it is about this one that's different than the Zachlikes, or even some of the lessers like Marvelous, Inc that I did complete. I think it's the feeling that I'm not really trying to get anything accomplished, rather than just fighting with the intentionally limited syntax provided to check off all the boxes. I've solved all these before in other games, but now I'll do it with *these* commands.

Human Resource Machine and the like have the same issue, but they get around it with a lot of flavor. I think if I'm going to do exercises quite this generic, it probably is going to be an online coding ranking site, not this game. After 20 hours, I think I'm ready to hang it up. It's TIS-100 levels of dry without the same sort of mental gymnastics that makes the time worth it. And I'm not sure I think TIS-100 would do that well in 2021, either.

I hate to give it a bad review, because I think it does get *almost* there and it is a *competent* coding game. If I had the option to give it a 2 star review, I would. But since I do feel like it's been time not well-spent compared to the other options out there for the same exact exercises, I think I have to give it a thumbs down.

Binged this game from the beginning this last MLK weekend, after a few times taking a light run at it before and peeling off. This time I leaned in, and I’m in the last few levels now.

Man, what a trip. I’ve played the NAND game and MRHD, among others, but never quite got to the “build a computer” endgame. I did with this one. At this point I’ve built a 256-byte RAM system that does six math instructions, six conditional jumps, and subroutine calls using its own stack—then developed my own assembly language for it which I'm now using in the endgame to solve more traditional programming puzzles.

And I designed and built the entire architecture for it myself. The initial levels are mostly "one solution only" problems that each results in you designing a component. But by the time you're at midgame, all the decisions are yours as long as the output is correct. Previous problems tend to hint towards partial solutions of later problems, but very little is given to you outright. That gives you an incredible sense of accomplishment for what you put together.

What a thrill it was to get past adding the math instructions to adding the conditional jumps, and to discover that the tech decisions I made for the former (plus some clever crafting of the previous puzzles to define conditional opcodes as the same as math + a high bit) led to the latter being entirely incremental.

Or when the campaign led me by the nose through implementing a stack using the same basic controls as the RAM component—again, leading me to reuse infrastructure—and then suddenly set me loose to implement subroutine call/return using it with no further instruction than explaining that the return address needed to be an instruction later.

I’d already done the work of making the stack programmable, so I had the connections right there and just had to set up a hardcoded way to push addresses to the stack and counter at the right times. It actually meant ripping out more stuff than I had to add anew. Sounds intimidating but when you’re already knee deep in the “circuitry” it’s like working on your project car—you’re totally familiar and things flow.

Or how cool was it to realize that “immediate” mode for opcode parameters was probably originally called that because they *also* implemented it as a switched mux that cut off the circuits that selected registers for arguments in favor of “immediate” wiring of the inputs?

Or when I realized I was using “immediate zero” a lot, and (without being directed by a puzzle) created a “_" [indexed as 16] pseudo-register that actually cut off the argument bus entirely, leaving the argument as a hardcoded zero. That let me define new opcodes like "sav [src] _ [dest]" or "jmp _ _ [dest]" which were really just aliases for "add [src] 0 [dest]" or "jeq 0 0 [dest]" without them all needing extraneous immediate flags for the empty parameters.

Even better, I discovered the “disable” pin I’d put on the custom bus selector component I’d designed already did exactly this, when wired to bit 4 of the incoming value, and got to celebrate another prescient tech decision.

Even just the thrill of extracting really hairy parts of my circuits, designing them into standalone components, and reimplementing in terms of those is addicting. I’ve caught myself zooming out from my “computer” to admire the trace symmetry and how clean I’ve gotten parts of it, and I actually feel accomplished.

The game is far from perfect: wiring management in particular is a minor nightmare, with too few colors and a tendency for wires to cross connect as you drag attached components around. That’s especially true since highly attached components sometimes “drop out” of drag on their own.

There’s no way to, say, click a wire and see its routing, and the wiring engine has a *really* nasty tendency to route separate wires on top of each other in a way that makes it impossible to see the individual routings and makes them impossible to separate later. And then it has the rather awful behavior that if you hook another wire to a “combined” set by mistake (or by dragging a component around when it stutters and drops with a pin in the wrong place) it collapses the stacked set and shorts them *all* together. I find myself hitting Ctrl-Z a lot to find the last time things weren’t shorted out.

And labeling is just terrible. You can label a wire but if you add junctions it splits the wire in a way that eventually makes the label either relocate or disappear. And you can’t label *components* or add free text to the “breadboard” to label systems. I’ll be pretty well screwed coming back to this later for lack of hardware layout “comments,” so be prepared to binge to get it done. You pretty much have to because of the spaghetti problem.

And then there are more minor issues: component menus open on top of each other, and make things hard to select. Custom components with multiple inputs and outputs usually end up with unreadable labels that overlap each other. The need to select all wire terminals along with the component they’re on to get auto-routing on the wiring sucks, and the drag handles for a multi select work differently than most apps.

The game also never explains schematics to you, that there is only a single OVERTURE or LEG schematic, or that you’ll be totally screwing yourself in other levels if you sandbox your computer without making a copy first because using that schematic in the sandbox also just modified all your solutions.

Coming from Zachtonics games with all their polish, this is all pretty painful. And I do miss leaderboards, assuming they don’t unlock when I complete the campaign. Yet, somehow the appeal of iteration, componentization, and optimization has kept me coming back to this one with a passion and feeling of ownership I haven’t experienced in a long time.

Highly recommended, rough edges and all, especially in the “build yourself a computer” subgenre! This could be better, but it does hit the button really nicely.

I've gotten my money's worth, but it's become boring a lot faster than Monster Train or Slay the Spire.

I can't quite put my finger on why, but I think it's something between not actually bringing much new to the table besides the fog of war (which is OK, but not compelling in and of itself) and the variety plateauing after you beat it a few times--likely by chance since you can't really control your combo acquisition and don't get many chances to burn cards to tune your deck. The only strategy to speak of is in how you allot your gems, and that's underwhelming because once you've placed a gem it can't be modified, so you can't really make mistakes and learn.

Once you get a point in each skill tree node, I'm pretty sure you've seen everything but your card unlocks, and it's just bouncing off the RNG hoping for a lucky shop combo in the whole 3 merchants you get for an entire run, or a lucky gem drop on the map. The challenge system also doesn't feel like a challenge so much as annoying hobbles that make you have to do all of some kind of map node or only play cards from one position or not be able to afford shops--things that lower gameplay variety, not increase them.

I think it has a lot of potential with some serious expansion, and maybe I'll get surprised with variety (very) hidden behind a level gate. But so far this is a distant third for me behind StS and Monster Train for games purely of this type, and even further back than that once you start figuring in hybrids like Gordian Quest, Griftlands, Nowhere Prophet, etc. Given the game is a little pricey for the amount of variety I've seen, I can only recommend it on sale.

Decent little programming game. Falls short of a true Zachlike in a number of ways (multiple saves, histogram) but otherwise pretty similar gameplay.

Biggest complaint is that debugging is a bear. Breakpoints are fine, but execution won't scroll to show the current instruction so you have to micromanage that. The data cells are insanely small for some puzzles, so you can't clearly see what's happening. There's no option to step backwards from error, so error reproduction is nearly impossible for anything complex that fails way down the line.

I finished it (high praise from me) but it wasn't always as fun as I'd have liked because too much time was spent drilling on hard debugs. It didn't feel like a game challenge, more just a bad interface in that regard. Otherwise, I liked it quite a bit.