Thanks for the detailed reviews and discussion, all. That plus the vid (and my love of Zaga-33) have moved this game from my "have to grab" list to my "grabbed it" list! Now I know how to spend my Sunday. I think I can spare the 6MB
I'm going to pick up Corrypt because of you! It has been awhile since I've played a game as much as I have been playing 868-HACK. I even re-downloaded Zaga 33 to give that another spin.
I have been a lurker on this site for a long time and at this point I would say that iOS is where I play most of my games(even though I own 3 modern gaming consoles). However, 868-hack is the game that drove me to create an account here. Seriously what an amazing game. I just got to 49 points on 4 runs and I still have 2 more progs to unlock. Seriously this is like a hybrid between spelunky and chess. Both things I have been insanely addicted to at some point in my life. What a great game.
Cool. Spoiler Just make sure you stick with it past the point where it might seem "ok, but just another puzzle game".
That is a pretty great way to describe it, actually! I had one run at 72 tonight (that I probably could have made 78 but I didn't want to risk it!) and then the next run I was at ~50 in sector 7 but then screwed up my timing against a cryptog and died, ugh
I'm yet to buy this, but with you guys speaking of making it to levels and sectors, is this one of those games where each play you have to make it up to certain levels. Like start at level 1 every time. No general progression through saves, but more like start at one, play, make it to level 5, do something silly and die, and have to start all over again. Is this one of those types of games?
Kind of, in a weird way. A single session is your run through 8 progressively more difficult sectors (difficulty dictated by the number of baddies in the sector from the very start of that sector in addition to whatever baddies you still had hanging around from the last level). If you manage to make it to the exit of the 8th sector you "win" (and will now have the chance to see a new program in all future runs). Now the next run you make you'll start all over again from scratch with that program you just unlocked on your last run. If you manage to win a second time in a row you'll have started a "streak" and all of you successful wins in a row scores are combined until you finally die and your streak score is reset. So the game tracks both your best single run score and your top combined successful runs in a row scores. Like single missions combining into a campaign of sorts.
In roguelikes "you" do level up over the long term. By "you" I mean the player. You learn strategies that prolong your life. Also, in this game you unlock more abilities as time goes on and they also impact your playstyle.
portrait mode? This may seem strange, but I don't buy landscape only games (I insist on playing with one hand while in public transportation. So... does this have a portrait mode? The screenshots look like landscape only, but I don't see a reason why it couldn't support portrait mode.
Landscape only. That said, it's still quite easy to play 1 handed. I'm not sure why he didn't use the same setup as Zaga 33 where it goes to portrait and the sidebar goes to the bottom (with text sideways).
Exactly what I was going to say, Zaga 33, his somewhat similar Sci-Fi dungeon romp DOES support both landscape and portrait.
my guess would be that laying out ui controls is enough of a pain for one screen layout (x2 for the ipad versions), and laying it out for the other rotation would be extra pain.
Oh, this reminds me, is there a limit to how many programs you can have installed on your rig on a run? I've never really pushed it but would hate to find out the hard way when some rarely used program blocks me from adding a key one. I know there are 20+ possible in the game but doubt you could ever actually have ALL installed.
Thanks Royce for clearing that up. It is a pain, but I just don't understand why these games give landscape such a preference. I often observe people holding their phones in landscape with their big hands in an uncomfortable way and it looks silly. Especially, if 868-hack can be played with one hand, it would just be the ideal addition to my collection of casually-in-the-train-playable-games-while-still-looking-relatively-cool-(-and-not-nerdy-at-all)-games list, such as slay, 10000000, dungeon raid, wopr, etc.
You *can* actually play it in portrait, you just have to read the stuff sideways. It may sound kinda silly, but it's really not that hard, especially since the game is turn based so you can take as much time to read stuff as you want (that said, i still play in landscape most of the time).
because basically every other computer system in existence runs in landscape. it's actually pretty time-consuming to make sure everything works both ways and for someone like me, doing everything myself with limited resources, i'm going to pick the orientation that works for PC as well. if anything sells enough for me to pay someone else to go through and fill out nice-to-have-but-not-essential details like this then i'll get on it. but for now it would directly take time away from making games and it's not a top priority for me. sorry!
Good point as the only stuff you'll ever need to read sideways are the program titles and 1 digit numbers in firewalls. The text is incredibly minimal in this game.
there's a limit of ten, which is how many fit in the sidebar. when you add a new one it pushes out the oldest..
