Surely a bit less difficult than Robot Odyssey, but immensely enjoyable nonetheless. I finally forced myself to uninstall it after spending waaaay too much time hyperoptimizing my solutions against the online leaderboard... it was rather addicting. :)
Incidentally, I didn't realize that he was the creator of Infiniminer. For those unfamiliar with the game, it is what inspired Notch to create Minecraft.
Oh man, Codex of Alchemical Engineering is a game that brings back very fond memories. In fact, he also made KOHCTPYKTOP: Engineer of the People http://www.zachtronics.com/play-kohctpyktop/ another game that I used to love.
I had a discussion with the creator about beating the last level. I had a solution that solved 95% of it, but I have no idea if it was close to working. Zachary confessed he hadn't beaten it either, but he did prove that it was possible.
On another note, the histograms you get after beating a level are the best high score screen implementation I have ever seen. I gush over them whenever I get the chance.
> I actually quit playing SpaceChem because the difficulty of the puzzles progressed to the point where I felt I should be getting paid to solve them.
I have (or had, I guess) the same sort of response to the score screens at the end of a Firefight game in Halo ODST. It would show you charts and tables for your progress through waves, your weapon usage and kills per enemy, a graph of your deaths, etc. Every game should provide stats like that.
SpaceChem is one of my most-used examples for "this is what happens when you take a game mechanic and optimize it to infinity". Amazing depth and complexity and a really long play-through that stays interesting. And then that leaderboard pops up and makes mockery of your past hour of work, egging you on to beat the curve somewhere. I love it.
Fascinating! After reading this I was encouraged to see if anyone had covered the game on YouTube and found a guy who did a whole let's play series on it while explaining what he was doing and how the puzzles worked. Part 1 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJeseZEZn6Y for anyone curious.
There is also a clone written in Java, Droidquest, which contains all of the original levels and an additional secret level: http://www.droidquest.com/
i love how minecraft has this redstone system. the latest update also added a cloning command, so you no longer need to repeatedly make the same circuts again and again - you can carry a command block, and click a button to clone a circut/place it, leading to better abstraction.
Oh I enjoyed this game when it came out. It was what convinced me I had made the right choice to get an EE degree rather than "just" a CS degree. I really wanted to connect programs to thrusters, not just subroutines.
Same here. I was 8 or 9 years old and couldn't understand how chips worked. They were just sort of magic to me, so I wired all my solutions without chips. It required a massive mess of logic gates to solve things like the Ventilation Shaft and Minefield puzzles in level 4.
The signals puzzle in level 5 was as far as I could get... but it got me hooked on algorithmic problem solving.
Edit: to get an idea of the complexity of the puzzles, here's a link to a walkthrough of level 4:
Really cool. I hadn't seen this game before, but the idea is dear to my heart since a few years back I developed a similar iOS app called Circuit Coder. Sorry for the shameless plug, but if you're into games like this, it might be worth knowing about.
Never played the game, but reading about this reminded me about how awesome my life is. There are so many great games and other resources out there. I just started to brush up my math on Khan Academy for fun.
While it is commonplace to complain about the youth an how spoiled they all are we should remember that young people today have a plethora of ressources at their hands and if pointed into the direction of the nearest hackerspace, or community garden or similar open and encouraging environment, they can do and learn whatever they want.
All we as parents and grown ups have to do is to point them to these opportunities and to encourage them to explore their talents.
Wow, thanks for posting this. I read about this game on Micah's blog a few years ago and while I had forgotten the name until now, it's been stuck in my mind ever since. Maybe I'll actually give it a shot this time!
Inspired, I tried DroidQuest, but can't get figure out the controls. I feel like I'm missing something really dumb, but all I can do is move around the starting menu, how do I select something?
This is probably the game that had the most impact on my interest in computers as a kid.
I think all we had access to were cracked versions in Juneau, Alaska where I grew up (I remember it as a "Black Bag Crack"), so I don't think it was possible to finish the version I played. Regardless, in 4th grade I loved it, but I don't think I actually got that far.
However, I realized later that it had given me the foundation of my understanding of digital logic. It's kind of awesome when I think about that.
This game also helped define me. I remember running around 5th grade thinking in my head 'beep pause pause beep beep pause'.
I created a parallel to serial and back set of chips to create a remote control system to get through the invisible maze level.
I played this on either a Tandy color computer 2 or 3 ... not sure which. I wonder how many engineers/programmers this game created. Such great memories.
If you like really hard puzzle games, give "Puzzle Moppet" a shot sometime... I recently got an email from a hardcore puzzle fan who has been playing it on and off for a year, but still was unable to complete it.
The gameplay isn't particularly innovative though, and it didn't sell well.
There's an early windows game Bug Brain which sounds quite similar. You're building brains of various insects and worms from single neurons to perform various tasks.
The guy in the above mentioned 'lets play' videos says that the DOS version (he has) has a bug which lets you use the soldering iron in the tutorials but not in the actual game.
It all seemed reasonably simple until I saw you can put chips inside robots and chips inside chips. Let this be a lesson to you kids - nothing can complicate things like recursion can complicate like recursion can complicate like recursion can complicate stack overflow error things.
http://www.spacechemthegame.com/
Surely a bit less difficult than Robot Odyssey, but immensely enjoyable nonetheless. I finally forced myself to uninstall it after spending waaaay too much time hyperoptimizing my solutions against the online leaderboard... it was rather addicting. :)