Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Game Review: TIS-100

TIS is a new game by Zachtronics. tl:dr; Geek? Buy it.

Earlier, I had written about the lack of diversity in games. The world doesn't need another action adventure first person shooter. What it needs is creative games, games that make you evaluate, to think new thoughts. I loved a game that made you burn stuff, and a gem by Zachtronics called Space Chem. I have been interested in Zachtronics' catalog since SpaceChem. For background, SpaceChem was about splitting and combining atoms to make new molecules.

TIS-100 is about parallel programming. But that's as vacuous as saying Chess is about moving wooden pieces on a board. TIS is about writing good code, about making magic with very little, about learning how best to utilize a small instruction set.

It is about reliving 80s computing: complete with a ratty manual, an uncertainty about what to make. Walk away with an appreciation that you can do a lot. Learn the system, and you can bend it to your will.

You write assembly language programs for a computer that has multiple stream processors, where multi-processor communication is a one-cycle primitive, and you choose how to achieve the objective.

You don't need to know assembly, you don't need to know programming. You don't need knowledge of Chemistry for SpaceChem, you don't need to know programming for TIS-100.

But at the end of it, you appreciate programming and you learn how much fun programming can be.

TIS is an absolutely amazing game. A game that I will be recommending to many friends, and their young kids.


Here's a video showing the different processors (little square boxes). The highlights are on executing lines, and the left side shows inputs and expected outputs.


Video courtesy: me.