Upon opening most of these, you’re greeted with a page of the manual, which contains text explaining the mechanics you will be working with accompanied by some pictures.
#Spacechem no thanks necessary series#
After watching through this, the player continues through a series of introductory levels. I don’t think I was the only one who found this bizarre. To reiterate, you click a button in SpaceChem, the program, and an video opens up in your browser. Information is repeated right after it has been said, and the emphasis on relatively unimportant details makes it seem like the victim of changes following last-minute playtesting.Īfter working your way through the menus, SpaceChem introduces it’s mechanics through a youtube video. Despite the tutorial for a complicated puzzle game such as this one being critical the every player’s experience of the game, it seems like they were an afterthought. SpaceChem doesn’t do a very good job at teaching the player the game’s mechanics. The counterpoint to that being how bad the retention is, especially during the first few stages. One could argue that this is healthy, and allows the “Eureka moment” when you finally figure is out to be all the more satisfying. For example, you can very easily get stuck in SpaceChem, the player is given little guidance to exactly how each problem might be solved, so players can go very far down the wrong branch of a path without realizing it. There’s nothing about this that inherently makes the puzzles or the experience in general better, in fact, it has some prominent downsides. This discussion of “freedom” in how you can solve puzzles is missing the forest for the trees.
#Spacechem no thanks necessary free#
Whereas before the player was free to use whatever technique they could discover to turn the given input into the given output, now they also have to determine what inputs and outputs each reactor will need to take in order to be able to solve the problem later down the line. Instead of trying to come up with a process that works within a single reactor, you are tasked with making a set of many reactors connected by pipes that turns some inputs into more complex molecules that you load onto ships.īy adding this layer of complexity, SpaceChem becomes even more open ended. With the introduction of the second planet, this becomes even more complex. If we take into account that only only about 33% of players got past the 2nd planet, there’s a fairly decent chance that your solutions might be entirely unique. What happens in between is almost completely open-ended. Every time you load into a puzzle, the game gives you some inputs in the form of atoms or molecules, and you must work to create a network of “waldos” that turns these into some predetermined outputs.
Unlike its contemporaries, SpaceChem is incredibly open ended. Your experience clearing each mission with each technique might be different from someone else’s, but you’re still fundamentally applying the same solution as any other player. Even puzzle games that are touted for the freedom they give to their players like the recent hitman games have their many solutions predetermined by its designers. Most puzzle games have you working through a series of puzzles with predefined solutions. But many would have some exposure to digital electronics and either would have known it or known where to look for more information.SpaceChem is a fairly unique game. I imagine that a lot of kids playing the game didn't have any exposure to this stuff and so, you're right, they'd have to make some big intuitive leaps that would be quite impressive. The digital logic stuff made a big impression on me in exactly the way that this author describes. I guess there must have been a separate IC book and a elementary digital logic book. That's how I first learned, probably during my freshman year or so when I was 14, about the different kinds of transistors, how they worked, and then also about both the basic analog and digital circuits made from them. (While I was in high school, the HS got its first computer in the form of a TRS-80 and I also had access to a minicomputer at the university where my dad was a programmer.) So I never was exposed to Robot Odyssey.īut what I did have were a number of introductory electronics books from the local Radio Shack (actually a hardware store that was an outlet the town was too small for its own actual Radio Shack). I didn't have a computer when I was a kid, though if we'd had more money I might well have by the time I entered high school in 1978. It wasn't a dark-age of knowledge before the Internet. In some cases, but not necessarily in others. "Rather, you as a child would have needed to independently reinvent the concept of a flip-flop without aid from the unavailable internet, then build it out of logic gates."
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