[OK, so I hit send too soon...]




cheap. But I've become utterly addicted to it.

So what is it? Well, basically it's a computer game about computer 
programming. That's essentially what it comes down to.

Describing exactly how to play the game is like trying to explain 
exactly how tetris works. It's a simple enough idea, but there's a 
surprising number of bits you need to explain for it to make sense.

Basically you design reactors. A reactor is basically a robot for moving 
atoms around. You have an infinite supply of input molecules, and you 
have to construct a specified quantity of a specified type of output 
molecule.

You control the reactor by building a kind of train track. When you hit 
the start button, a cursor drives down the track. You can put various 
command nodes on the track, and when the cursor reaches them, the 
commands execute. There are commands for picking up or dropping atoms, 
rotating them, making or breaking chemical bonds, and so forth.

All of this /would/ be pretty easy, except that the game works on a 
grid. The grid is pretty coarse, and you can only put one command per 
grid square. You also can't lay a track that goes through the same 
square twice in the same direction. There are two different colours of 
track, so you can visit a square twice. But if you need to visit it 
three times... the design becomes very, very tricky.

Therein lies the puzzle. Sometimes you can rotate a molecule so that a 
particular atom ends up on the same square twice even though the cursor 
doesn't. Sometimes you can use one track to move the molecule and the 
other track just to generate control signals to script the first track. 
And sometimes you have to do something even more devious to find a solution.

Having come up with this concept - build a robot that transforms 
chemicals - they could have just kept giving you harder and harder 
assignments. But I've been playing it for a day or two now, and every 
few levels they add something new and interesting. For example, a sensor 
that lets you conditionally branch depending on what kind of atom is 
detected.

Initially you work on building a reactor. But each reactor has up to two 
inputs and two outputs, and only a limited number of grid squares. Later 
levels give you multiple ins and outs, and you have to design and 
connect together multiple reactors. The initial inputs and final outputs 
are stipulated; what the intermediate stages should be is up to you. On 
top of that, molecules pile in in the pipelines between reactors, and 
enough of a backlog can bring a reactor to a halt. All of which adds an 
edge of economy management flavour to the game as well. Sometimes 
getting one reactor to run as fast as possible can be critical, so 
there's program optimisation in there too.

The sound is pretty poor, the graphics are cheesy but functional. The 
game does have the occasional glitch where I don't think it did what it 
should have done. (And I'd love to stop it trying to install the .NET 
framework every time I launch it!) It's frustrating that if there's an 
error, the whole network resets itself and you can't inspect it to see 
what went wrong. (Especially annoying for networks that only fail after 
several bazillion iterations!)

However, in spite of all these flaws, I just can't put this game down.

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