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Comment by em3rgent0rdr | Hacker News Reader

I'd only recommend HRM for people who haven't touched assembly before. For those that have, it is a bit of a waste of time and not very challenging...I kept hoping the problems would be harder, and maybe something that you wouldn't do in an introductory college course.

TIS and Shenzhen I/O on the other hand have unique challenges and are well worth your time investment for help thinking outside of the box. Many different ways to solve the problems, unlike HRM where there is basically one obvious speed and one obvious size solution.

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On the contrary, I teach x86 assembly to advanced audiences and I still haven't solved some of the harder optimization problems there. It was so much fun!

Maybe I gave up on the game too early. The difficulty was not ramping up fast enough for me. I might take your advice and reinstall it and continue where I left off.

I thought HRM had a very odd skill curve, started out very easy and then got difficult quickly. I think overall it's too hard for somebody who isn't a programmer, and there aren't enough hard problems for a programmer. And once the problems got hard, it seemed more like work and less like fun. And a lot of it seemed like busy work since there were so few instructions.

Excellent point...I think that is what was happening...I must have gotten to the "hard" zone as you describe, and simply got bored of work, but wasn't challenged (which is what I want from a game).

I've never been able to articulate why I gave up on this game when I did, and your comment finally put it into words. Spot on observation, thanks!

I don't really know assembly (other than a little RISC) and I breezed through HRM, but I still had a lot of fun with it. There's some real charm and humour wrapped around its programming puzzles, unlike most games of its ilk.

The main game is only half the story though, fully optimising the later levels and especially the optional challenge levels is not trivial!

+1 for assembly

I'd love to see more assembly-like games. I've hear about Core War, well so far there are no new exciting progress.

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