Some assembly (language) required - Three games that make low-level coding fun [Resources_Geek Life]
Stephen Cass · IEEE Spectrum · 2017
Ah, assembly. Where all the pretense of high-level languages-the program structures, the data handling, the wealth of functions-gets stripped away. You get branches, bytes, and if you're lucky, a subtraction command. True, directly manipulating the state of a computer can be powerful, but few people code in assembly by choice. . So I was surprised to find not one but three polished games that do a surprisingly good job of making coding in assembly language fun. To be clear, none of these titles involve writing assembly for real hardware. They all use virtual systems with minimal instruction sets. Still, they do capture the essence of assembly coding, with complex behaviors squeezed out of simple commands. . The first game is Human Resource Machine, originally released in 2015 by Tomorrow Corp. and now available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and the new Nintendo Switch. In this game the player takes on the role of an office worker who must handle numbers and letters arriving on an "in" conveyor belt and put the desired results on an "out" conveyor belt. As you begin, you're given just two instructions to work with. As you progress and face more complex challenges, more instructions are provided. Challenges range in difficulty from outputting the larger of a pair of input numbers to sorting variable-length sequences.