TIS-100

 PC
Metascore
tbd

No score yet - based on 3 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2 out of 3
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 3
  3. Negative: 0 out of 3
  1. 4P.de
    Aug 17, 2015
    84
    This is as dry as it gets. It makes a game out of some peoples’ jobs. And in all its minimalistic glory it is a lot of fun. But conceptually it is not as far as it may seem in the beginning from the author’s earlier works like SpecChem or Infinifactory.
  2. Brash Games
    Sep 21, 2015
    80
    It manages to maintain an even balance of being fun and being educational.
  3. CD-Action
    Oct 17, 2015
    70
    Zach Barth (the author of Infinifactory) is back and again creativity – both the developer’s and yours – plays first fiddle. [10/2015, p.71]
    All this publication's reviews

User Reviews

All reviews »
User Score
7.9

Generally favorable reviews- based on 29 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 22 out of 29
  2. Mixed: 3 out of 29
  3. Negative: 4 out of 29
  1. Did-
    Mar 22, 2019
    9
    Did you ever wanted to sort a sequence of numbers in a assembly language with parallel nodes?
    Oh? Really? Huh, ok. Then I guess TIS-100 is    Did you ever wanted to sort a sequence of numbers in a assembly language with parallel nodes?
    Oh? Really? Huh, ok. Then I guess TIS-100 is made for you. I wasn’t ready, sorry, usually people prefer games with guns or cars, you know.

    Anyway, TIS-100 is an emulator for an imaginary machine, on which you code with a set of 13 simple instructions on up to 12 parallel nodes, each having a space for only 15 different instructions. Program space quickly becomes an issue and asks of you to be clever to make your program fit.

    Compared to classic assembly instruction sets like x86, TIS-100 is really simple, and does not offer much. You can move values, add and subtract, do conditional jumps, but not multiply, divide, do logical operations nor bits operation. And more importantly, each node has only access to two registers, but only one can be accessed directly, the other acting more like a distant memory. This makes the coding tedious at times, and forces you to think differently to create programs.

    And the later problems in the games ask you for example to determine the prime factors of a number up to 99, in ascending order (e.g. 86 would result in “2, 2, 3, 7”). When finally, after hours of thinking and programming, your program finally goes through all the numbers successfully, a feeling of proudness arises.

    And if solving the problems is not enough for you, you can still try to optimize your programs so they execute faster, or take less space in number of nodes or instructions. My personal objectives was always to go for the fastest program, but sometimes it’s really impossible to match some internet records.

    I started playing this game years ago, and stopped playing thrice for multiple months before going back to it, but I finally beat all the problems of this game and am ready to test my mind onto another of Zachtronics game. Story of my life.    … Full Review »
  2. mno
    Sep 25, 2018
    5
    A somehow decent idea but I prefer to program things, I doenjoy, on my own before dealing with those artificial obstacles.
  3. MacBinary
    Jan 7, 2018
    10
    A great game for anyone who enjoys the challenge of coding within confined memory.
See all user reviews »