TIS-100 brought back some of the same joy that I had when I began with programming many years ago. Since then programming has become boring for me, but the weird limitations of TIS-100 almost made it feel like I was starting fresh again. I loved learning tons of small tricks that I could apply to beat the harder levels.
Shenzhen I/O otoh felt like work.
Exapunks was my favorite of the three. If you liked TIS-100 I'd highly recommend trying out Exapunks.
Shenzen has that card game though, so you can slack off at work
Yeah. Why fire up Shenzhen I/O when you can instead dive into a design around some neat, but poorly documented chip from China in kicad.
Or jyst some interestimg hardware project in general.
In Shenzhen I/O, at least you know going in that every task is actually solvable.
And getting it wrong won’t set fire to anything. Or get your LAN hacked.