Gates: The Puzzles

MentalGuy's Gates: The Puzzles is a unique MegaZeux game that presents the player with four puzzles. These puzzles were presumably taken from a larger project simply titled Gates, though nothing seems to exist of this.

Puzzles

Gates' four puzzles include the sliding tile picture puzzle, Chinese solitaire (jumping balls), a Lights-Out puzzle (elevator buttons), and a rotating panels puzzle. Each puzzle is controlled via a Windows-style mouse pointer (though this is controlled by the keyboard, as the game predates the mouse support found in MZX 2.51s1. The puzzles, while a little on the easy side for a clever player, were implemented very well, especially considering the counter limits of the day.

Picture Scramble

This is a 15-tile sliding picture puzzle. The objective is to rearrange the tiles so that the picture is complete. This version of the puzzle differs from more "traditional" slider puzzles, in that the numbers on the picture count up from 1 to 15 from left to right, bottom to top.

Jumping Balls

A Chinese-style peg jumping game, where the player must eliminate balls by jumping one ball over another. The ball that has been "jumped" gets removed from the board. The balls are arranged on a 4x3 grid, making this puzzle exceptionally easy, but no less impressive in terms of implementation.

Elevator Buttons

A randomized Lights-Out puzzle. The player is presented with a 5x4 grid of elevator buttons. Upon pressing a button, that button's light will be toggled on and off, along with the four buttons adjacent to it. Unlike some other Lights-Out type puzzles, pressing a button on an edge or corner of the puzzle will not "wrap" around to the other side, so pressing a corner button will only toggle those buttons adjacent to it instead of also affecting those on the other edge of the board. This puzzle's initial state is randomized every time the Reset button is pressed.

Panels

A 6x3 grid of rotating panels is presented to the player, with a series of buttons along the edges of the board, one for each row or column. When each button is pressed, the entire row/column of panels is flipped from light to dark. The objective is to get all the panels to show the same color. This version of the puzzle also includes a question-mark button which, when pressed, will randomly flip a single panel on the grid, but will also count as a move.

When all the puzzles are finished, the game gives a reading of how well the player did at the puzzles, including the number of moves made and the total time taken to complete the game.