tism-100

Solid

Awsome game, a little bit hard but quite fun and usefull. Recommend trying.

hard. but it's assembly. so it deserves.
code space limitation is super tough.

Look, its not that I haven't already thrice in three levels considered that I just may be retarded for typing the wrong thing. Again. And it's not that thats exactly like how I sometimes am at my job.

But dammit, if this isn't true to life programming at some points.

10/10 experience, and I can highly recommend also printing the manual. It really does evoke the feeling of flipping through machine instruction pages looking up once again how to do a basic operation.

I'll admit, the puzzles are pretty fun with a good difficulty ramp.
It doesn't do much to try to draw you in though, very much fitting the theme of you just finding a random computer system that you don't know how to use. There is some story there, but at least initially, your main only reason to struggle through getting the machine working is curiosity.
So basically, it's just me doing my normal day job, just without the pay. The puzzles are more fun than my typical daily challenges though, so that's good. ;)

Fun

Great game, just wish I would have friends to compare my score with, but such is life.
I wish I had a lawn mower.

Pretty fun. Would recommend as a tool to understand pipelining.

It really is an incredibly niche game designed for people with a background or an interest in computer science.

It's a neat concept with very unambitious execution; the idea of having a series of interconnected nodes where the codes can either run code or be something else entirely like forms of storage and processing is interesting, but we only get the stack node. The manual even teases the RAM node and the mysterious T20, but those don't end up appearing in the game, and even with the stack nodes, your freedom is so limited; sure, you can place them anywhere in the puzzle editor, but in the sandboxes which have the keypads, they're in set locations in the Stack Memory Sandbox, and they're just not there at all in the Image Console Sandbox, so if you hoped to use Stack Memory nodes to make cool games or interactive functions in there, no.

The developers didn't really consider if people wanted to mess around with the language to make stuff; instead, they focused on providing a straightforward gameplay experience, with some leaderboards to chase. But as far as puzzle games go, it's very mediocre in that context; a small number of puzzles means the difficulty ramps up quickly, and there's oversights in several puzzles that lead to dumb cheese that isn't really about making an efficient algorithm, like the fact that every sequence in Sequence Indexer is ten items long so the fact that it's zero terminated doesn't matter because you can just hardcode the length value. A lot of levels have a minimum node count of four because often the output is four nodes away from the input so the node count part of the leaderboard is kind of moot. And the game has a light story communicated through a couple of logs that is interesting but doesn't go anywhere in the initial campaign because the game just ends on a random still image and a virtual reboot.

So, it's not a great puzzle game, it doesn't push it's concept, and it actively doesn't want you to mess around and experiment with the language. I don't know if it would have been able to accomplish the first thing, but I wish it at least had the courage to do the last two. Except someone else solved that. It's the TIS-3D mod for Minecraft, and it addresses those last two problems perfectly and absolutely. Too bad nobody ever puts it in their modpacks so you'll never get to play with it.