Colorshift, a flash game

June 5, 2009 1:50 PM

Colorshift is an interesting twist on Simon Tatham's Net game. Rather than creating a network to a single "power" node, you have to manage multiple colors, and mixing colors in crafty and devious ways.
posted by boo_radley (11 comments total)

Missing the most crucial feature of Net, which was locking tiles in place.
posted by TypographicalError at 1:59 PM on June 5, 2009

Yeah, that and right clicking to turn counter-clockwise.

If you think you've seen this before and dismiss it out of hand, give it a try til level 13 or 14.
posted by boo_radley at 2:03 PM on June 5, 2009

Yeah, soon as you hit wrapping it gets really too tedious to do without locking. Every time people clone this game, they forget to add that in. I don't get it.
posted by TypographicalError at 2:15 PM on June 5, 2009

1. Simon Tatham's Puzzle Collection is great. Not only is it a nice little collection of interesting puzzle games, you an even pass parameters to one of the game applets to cause it to output a Postscript file of however many random puzzles you want, for later printing and play when away from a computer.

2. But actually, both Net and Colorshift owe a large debt to Zenji, an early 8-bit computer game with faux-Eastern stylings written by Matthew Hubbard and published for several platforms by Activison.
posted by JHarris at 4:19 PM on June 5, 2009 [2 favorites]

(Forgot to include the YouTube link.)
posted by JHarris at 4:20 PM on June 5, 2009

It gets pretty fun around level 50. Usually takes me about 11-14 minutes to solve them then.

(also on kongregate, but no achievements yet)
posted by rubah at 6:16 PM on June 5, 2009

JHarris: Zenji looks like a neat game. There was a similar game for the Genesis called Junction that had you pilot an armadillo around the edges of the tile maze to complete levels, similar to Locomotion which might predate Zenji by a couple of years. The variations on the core mechanics are really interesting, I think: Sliding or rotating? Completing a network or guiding an actor to a goal (or goals)? Enemies or no?
posted by boo_radley at 11:45 PM on June 5, 2009

I have completed Junction, but I don't think it's really the same kind of thing. Junction is about shifting tiles containing tracks to keep a moving entity going, while Zenji is about moving an entity who is capable of rotating the tile he's in. (And Net and Colorshift have no entity at all, and any tile can be moved at any time.)

Locomotion/Junction are one of those types of games that crops up from time to time. The earliest example I'm aware of the sliding tracks would be either an Intellivision game called Happy Trails (written up in Electronic Games back in the day) or an Atari prototype arcade unit called Qwak (which, just to confuse things more, is otherwise unrelated to Atari's early Qwak light gun game).
posted by JHarris at 3:14 AM on June 6, 2009

All the games on this site immediately crash Firefox on my Linux machine.
posted by eye of newt at 6:44 PM on June 6, 2009

However, it worked fine from here.
posted by eye of newt at 6:52 PM on June 6, 2009

I'm up to level 80; this is just the right combination of tricky and mindless/obsessive for me.
posted by Michael Roberts at 8:16 PM on June 21, 2009