![]() But beyond this, it's a solid set up, functional rather than snazzy, but that's appropriate to the task. Kill it, kill it with bombs and options screens. The music played in the lift that descends to hell. I've encountered a bug where I couldn't get the Level Select screen to do anything, which required a restart. And when it comes to games as educational tools, it entirely avoids the most dreadful pitfall of them all: wackiness. The writing in those rather formal-looking pop-ups, however, is bright and cheerful, and most importantly, encouraging. ![]() It can't really escape from being a collection of circuit boards with a countdown timer, but it's all tidy and clear. Because when you do make a mistake, the explosion is instantaneous and makes me jump every single time.īomb Squad is neatly presented, if a little stuffily. (Sensibly there's an option to make these times much longer, for any who might need that.) When the boards start getting a lot more complex, it requires a deliberate effort to stay calm, do the diligent work, and not just panic and cut wires at random. With its digital countdowns, there's always plenty of time to solve a puzzle, but limiting you to a minute or two ensures there's a degree of pressure. That leads to a rather big bang, and a message informing you of your demise. Except without accidentally powering up "Detonate". You're disabling bombs, and that involves studying the circuit board, looking what's powering what, and working out a way to send power from the source to the LEDS marked "Disarm". What better application than pretending if you make a mistake you'll die. The theory of AND, OR and XOR gates are simple enough, but if you want to truly learn something, have it embed in your cranium, you need to apply it. ![]() I think the main reason all these basics went over my head at school was that so much was taught as floating theory, pencil-drawn circuit diagrams and faith. But what's so crucial is that it's instantly applied. The game is, in effect, one long tutorial, each new level adding in a new component (best pun I've ever used) like wiring, capacitors, XOR gates, and so on. ![]() As I play through its relatively simple challenges, I just keep thinking, "Good grief, if only I could have had this in 1994 instead of a tired physics teacher and some clapped out electronics boards."Īpproach it as an educational tool, rather than the latest in puzzle gaming innovation, and it does its job splendidly. Bomb Squad Academy is very unashamedly about teaching the basics of electronics, and the crucial thing is, it's managed to make that process immediately applied, and decent fun. It's not a platform game where you weirdly have to keep running through OR gates. The key difference here, from my mini-rant above, is that this isn't pretending to be something it's not. Ta.Īnyway, so there's a nice new puzzle game out called Bomb Squad Academy, a game about defusing bombs against the clock, and - WAIT A SECOND! This game's teaching me electronics! Why I oughtta. I'm 40 this year, my brain has pretty much established over multiple attempts that it just isn't willing to let in computer programming, along with French, the difference between "affect" and "effect", and the HTML for embedding an email address. But amongst their number is the cavalcade of recent games that feel the need to try to trick me into learning computer programming. If there's one thing I'm sick of, it means I've had some sort of head injury and forgotten the many, many, copious things I'm also sick of.
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