🕹️ Amazing

Hello, I am FreeMediaKids!. After my Worms upload, I am returning to the world of Macintosh gaming. This time, however, I am looking at early Mac games, going all the way back to 1984, which clearly was not like 1984 . I present to you the first maze game for Macintosh: Amazing! Although Wumpus was the first computer maze game overall, Amazing! was created for the Xerox Alto in the Christmas week of 1981. It later came to the attention of the Macintosh product training manager, who felt that it would reduce computer anxiety, develop hand-eye coordination with the mouse, and keep Mac users occupied as they waited for more software to arrive. It was bundled with the A Guided Tour of Macintosh diskette, which itself was packaged with the Macintosh 128K in 1984, making it not only one of the earliest games for Mac, but also one of the debut games for the debut model in a long line of Apple computers. In this game, using the mouse, the player needs to trace the path between two points, from the starting point represented by a circle to the finish point represented by a square. Tracing the path is straightforward; one moves the cursor ahead of the current position to move a block and over the previous drawn block to undo one block. Of course, one can only draw lines across a contiguous region and not across walls. All mazes are procedurally generated and not hand-drawn, and each difficulty level allows for possibilities of 2³² or 4,294,967,296. There are four difficulty settings. The first one, "Easy", is reminiscent of a time when your parents brought your child self to a restaurant, possibly a breakfast one, and asked the waiter for something you could draw on with a Crayon, often containing games like a maze game (at least that is what happened to me growing up). Fairly simple stuff, the only difference being that, instead of starting from either or both sides, here one must begin at the circle point. Moving up one setting, the paths begin to overlap, which allows for more space to draw in. The challenge starts to kick in. Tune it to the third setting, and narrow passageways connected by ramps are added, allowing for stacked layers of up to four. It is that this skill that solving a maze becomes very hard, where it is easy to confuse the contiguous white space for walls and overlook directions. For those who are stuck, one can take a peek at how to get to the square point by clicking Maze → Solution. The fourth and last skill, "Hard", is only marginally harder, but the ramps no longer appear only when the tunnels would otherwise reach a dead end, and the tunnels exhibit strange features such as bulbous corners and overhanging cornices. It is a fun little game, particularly on levels 2 to 4 for those like me who need challenge, and it is better than a run-of-the-mill computer maze game. It is like Microsoft Minesweeper for Windows 3.0, the kind of game we have spent countless hours on. Also, I am only now realizing that, until now, I have been oblivious to the existence of paper maze games other than those given to children at restaurants. The ones that offer adults challenge and have features like overlapping tunnels. The ones homemade and sold. Somehow, I missed those. Anyway, Amazing! is a nice free game to kill time, free if you do not count power consumption.