Are you puzzled by the TI-68k uploads? Let's look at some old ones...
Posted by Xavier on 25 November 2017, 23:07 GMT

Olivier "sangui" Sangala is no stranger to news features here: several of his TI-68k works, mostly ASM games written in C, were highlighted in the past. Nevertheless, a decade later, he remains one of the most productive authors in our archives, through small but attractive and sometimes addicting (mainly) puzzle and board games. Therefore, let's dig a bit deeper into his large collection :)

• CarOut will make you sweat a fair bit trying to let a car get out of 60 more or less complex traffic jams on a 6x6 grid. The first few levels will let you warm up and prepare for later, on average harder situations, where you need to move back and forth the target car and the blockers. You'll find that some cars which are not, at first, obviously in need of a move, prove to be roadblocks later.
• Sokoban isn't the only grayscale calculator-based reimplementation of the original Sokoban game from the early 1980s, whose principle is pushing a set of boxes, one at a time, from their initial respective places to a small set of destination places, through a more or less complex maze. Pulling these boxes is impossible, so cornering boxes (or blocking yourself between boxes) would make you eventually lose the game... that is, without the multi-step take back feature, a must have for canceling out your typos or thinkos. Without that feature, the game would be really annoying for the many levels which require hundreds of moves. What also sets this game apart from most other implementations for calculators is the breadth of the level set: a whopping total of 2750 levels (!) converted from sets made by other authors, split into 60 files of varied size. The game can work with a subset of these files. Obviously, we haven't tested, let alone solved, all levels ;-)
• SwapMaze will require a learning phase, and careful thought, to be able to get the shuffled numbers back in ascending numerical order on a 6x6 grid, through one-at-a-time rotates of columns and lines. You'll discover patterns and antipatterns to reach your goal.

The above programs are open source, and the same binaries work on all TI-68k models (89(T)/92/V200...), which yields both higher usability and less efficient programs. They do, however, not feature count-up / count-down timers, persistent highscores or savegames (merely a key to turn the calculator off), so they're not the best suited for playing short, split periods of time.

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