Playing A Game TIS-100 PC

It's no surprise that Zachtronics is capable of making a puzzle game that makes me question my own intelligence. I spent hours staring at empty playfields in SpaceChem trying to conquer that game's pantheon of puzzles. TIS-100, though. Man.

It doesn't help that TIS-100 subverts so many of my mental models for problem solving. SpaceChem could get a little wacky because of how it played with the concept of concurrency management in programming -- but TIS-100 feels like working on a broken computer. Having such a limited number of registers on each CPU, and a limited variety of instructions for dealing with them, is still difficult for me to wrap my head around.

Beyond that, though, this is just an especially challenging game. TIS wastes little time ramping up its implicit concepts - forcing you into understanding techniques to propagate signals, store temporary data, and nest loops - and throwing down really astonishingly complex problems. At least, complex in its world of limited instructions and registers.

I love figuring out how to accomplish simple logical tasks in TIS, almost as much as I love posting better optimization scores than my Steam friends. But I also hate looking at a problem set that would be so simple to solve with a real CPU, only to realize how much work it will be to re-learn in the TIS language.

It's a paradox.

Progress: Repaired 17 nodes

Rating: Awesome