#8 Mindreader and Nim
Entry posted by Guest
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For those of you who don't know. Nim is a game where you start with a quantity of piles of items. You and your opponent take turns removing any number of items from any pile, including the whole pile. The idea is to be the one to take the last item left. In this port of the ancient game, the piles are represented by numbers in blue squares. The controller works well for this one, too. Move the joystick in a direction to choose the pile, twist the stick to add or subtract from the pile, push the plunger down to confirm, pull it to cancel. Very intuitive actually. You can have three, six or nine piles.
I played this one for almost four hours over the course of two days. Truth. I loved playing Nim. I hadn't ever had the opportunity to play NIM since I was about six years old. It was interesting to play through a few rounds and start to see the patterns and the number combinations one had to reach to ensure a win. The instructions for this game explain exactly what you need to do to win a game. You convert the total number for each pile into it's binary equivalent, add the piles together and figure out what you need to do so that the sum of them all equal zero. Or something like that. The manual gives a better explanation. I was able to beat the game consistently after a while, but only if I used pencil and paper, which I'm afraid I consider a type of cheating without cheatcodes.
Mindreader is also fun. It's like the game Mastermind and its closest home videogame relative is Fun with Numbers(RCA Studio II, 1977). In this version, you try to guess a two, three, four or five digit number. You input your guess and the computer gives you a hint by telling you if you guessed a correct digit in the sequence and if you guessed it in the correct order.
Say your number is 783 and your guess was 748, the game would respond with "HT" meaning one of your digits is a "hit" and is the right number in the right place and one of your digits is a "T" for transpose, meaning right number but not in the right place. Obviously, guessing a two or three digit number is a lot easier than guessing a four or five digit number. Every time you make a guess, the computer gets a point. Every time you solve a number, you get the remaining points. In other words, you have to solve the number in an average of 10 questions or less to beat the computer controlled console to the winning 100 score.I played this game a lot, too.
Okay, while far from the most amazing feat in graphics, this pair of games is still an incredible step up in the area of puzzle games. Yes, you could play these games with a friend and not need a videogame system, but you couldn't play them by yourself without one.
Next entry, Videocart #9
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