![]() Some really determined players released games for it, which you can play with EXAPUNKS: TEC Redshift Player. You can animate sprites, so that was something. You can also program a handheld console in this game, but the lack of high-level language kind of killed it for me. ![]() The mini game HACK*MATCH exists as a real NES cartridge. 30 minutes into my test session the console crashed and I had to open it back up to re-attach one of the wires that came off. I remember, to play imported games, I bought a modchip and was trying to attach it to the Dreamcast main board using a soldering iron that was probably three times too big, and made these unintended cherry blossom petal burn marks on the board. I smiled because I totally could relate to the situation. One of them is like an old-style match-four game, unlocking the mini game involves passing a level where you disable region lockout protection of a fictional game console. There are games in EXAPUNKS that do not involve programming, and they are fun distractions. Playing this game is like working a second job sometimes. And, like how concurrency is a mine field in real life, debugging the effects of REPL in-game is just as painful without any debugging aid. I like how many levels require the REPL keyword to make sure size of your EXAs stay under the limit. This, and the magazines that give you hints about solving the levels do add a nice style and theme to everything. I think logic games don't really require a reason to solve puzzles, but it is an interesting attempt. Tying together the levels is a story, but your response will not affect the story later, so early on it made the story unimportant and the interactions with EMBER-2 uninteresting for me. In beating the level I've also experienced a kind of personal growth, and it is quite satisfying. This is I think the best part of the game, because it asks for an improved solution and usually leads to a more optomized version than my initial version. Often when that happens your EXA will just be stuck spinning cycles. Level DesignĮach level has 100 test cases and you may find your solution doesn't work under all cases. This code fragment does not modify any registers, and I use it to trap execution so that I can check register contents up to this point. I feel like some debugging aids would improve my quality of life significantly and make the game feel less like work. Not having break points is particularly cruel, maybe that is part of the author's attempt to discourage longer code. There is no debugger, and so all you get is the ability to step through instructions one at a time, fast (but slow enough to still follow execution), or really fast (to go through all test cases). But that is not true if X is a keyword, it'll jump to label DOIT. You expect X to be larger than -9999 and T should be 1 after TEST. 9999 is the smallest integer in EXAPUNKS, normally you use it to seek to beginning of a file. The solution for me was from the truth table in the magazine kind of hidden away: TEST will always set T to 0 when you compare keyword with a number. The problem is that the data sets have a mixture of numbers and keywords. At some point in the game you'll need to replace a string with another. I guess it is part of the puzzle, but I didn't particular enjoy this aspect. It means that you must copy the string from somewhere it already exists. Missing string literals added a bit of complication. They are not multi-volume manuals, are easy to read, but difficult to scan. Not just for the set instructions, you have to read to figure out data formats, or just hints about what the puzzles are about. I mentioned earlier that reading is involved. Then, it is up to the players to set their own goals depending on how they like to play the game. Solving puzzles through use of this programming interface is a big draw, because it allows different solutions for the same problem. I am not sure if knowing programming is easier either I kept on typing the wrong keywords, for example. The challenging part of the game is managing registers and tracking logically the data you need, so once you get over the programming facade all you really need is logic. Although the concepts are far easier if you already have experience with programming, I feel the initial missions and magazine articles do a good job of showing you how it is all supposed to work. In this game you must write code so that your EXAs to do work for you. Unless you hate reading: there is a lot more reading than other similar puzzle games. If that sounds like a deterrent, it shouldn't. EXAPUNKS is a collection of puzzle games that requires programming an assembly-like language to progress to the next levels.
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