QuantumPulse 2A

Note to future Quantum Engineers, check out the wait/puls instructions early on. They make things much cleaner than my noop synchronization spaghetti. If only every language had a debugger that could go back in time. It's a good brain-teasing/programming game and very well presented.

A puzzle game where you solve problems with small, cooperating microchips, similar to TIS-100 or Shenzhen I/O. However, rather than communicating over wires, the chips broadcast values to each other over radio channels. The instruction set is, if anything, even simpler than other programming games. The chips don't even have an "add" instruction -- instead, when multiple chips broadcast simultaneously on the same channel, other chips can read the sum. But even though the chips are simple, they combine in surprisingly complex ways, allowing many different approaches to each level. Trying to match the fastest, smallest, or cheapest solutions found by other players is particularly challenging -- some of the scores seem almost impossible, others tantalizingly just out of reach... until you hit upon a new arrangement that lets you shave off that one last instruction. (And, of course, the game also includes a deceptively simple solitaire card game, similar to Freecell, unlocked after beating the first few levels.)

I felt in love to graphics and aesthetics of this game. And this game felt easy and awarding. But it was only during the demo and first few puzzles. The farther you go the more annoying the exercises will be. You will feel exhausted solving them and not happy at all. Situation gets worse when you reach stupid limitations of the game UX. E.g.: - you can't format your program and insert line break so that it becomes easier to read because all the lines should fit on the screen - you can't write sensible comments inside the code because of the short line - you have stickers but you can't use them too because they're limited too - if you fail to organize your chips you will really struggle to reorganize them

The system's design is far too tedious. What might be passed off as intentional limitations often feels simply annoying. It begins with nonsensical rules, like being unable to read from or jump by a node's own channel, and culminates in the absurdity of the 'radio transmission' mechanic. This forces you to waste most of your time just figuring out the correct timing through endless NOP instructions.

Great fun! It gets you thinking in ways similar to as in Shenzhen I/O and TIS-100: Who knows what when? How can I get rid of one more instruction? How do I get from "no way is that score possible" to "now I can use this one weird trick on future puzzles"? The major conceits are that inter-chip communication is done by radio values that sum when on the same channel, and that a chip can't use its own state to branch. This leads to values ricocheting around in a baroque manner on the one hand, but to some clever mechanics on the other. When it clicks it's really sweet and unique. One innovation (new to me at least): a "beat the team" mode in the leaderboard showing good scores from four people. Instead of chasing a very difficult #1 score one can first go after an excellent but not unreasonable #1 team score.

A nice zachlike, i had apprehension with the radio mechanic but it becomes good when you try it. Only gripe is you need to match or exceed a specific metric with your solution to get gold stars and i feel like i've missed a few important tricks that would've made it actually possible for me to get them on some puzzles, often those with a cycles requirement.

After the great demo version, finally some fun little assembler puzzles to have fun with. :)

Fun programming puzzles, but I hope comments are changed at some point to not count against a chip's LoC count (maybe chips could have scroll bars so comments could fit and line #s for actual instruction lines), as well as changing alias instructions to count for more than one line. Overall a fun experience so far though!