Old Games In Silverlight

It continually amazes me how many great games were published in the 80's and 90's in hobby programming magazines. Sure, they are not the type of games that a company like Electronic Arts would be interested in and are definitely not up to the standards of today's games on the PC, but casual gaming on the web and mobile devices has possibly created a new home for these games.

In one of my old programming magazines (Compute's! Gazette, June 1986 - Issue 36, Vol. 4, No. 6) described a game called Switcheroo, by Kevin Mykytyn and Mark Tuttle. A simple connect 5 on a 5x5 grid (horizontally or vertically, no diagonals) with a twist. The player can place a piece of his color on an empty space or he may shift a column up or down, or shift a row left or right. Any pieces that are removed from the board by the shift are places in at the end of the column or row in the newly vacant space.

I think that this game would be a great coding test for Silverlight, so I will be posting a multi-part blog entry on writing Switcheroo in Silverlight2.0.

Unfortunately, all the games published in Compute's! Gazette were in a version of Machine Language called "MLX", so the effort would be heroic to try to adjust the code to a more modern platform such as Silverlight. And, with the fact that there was no AI (It was a 2 player game) and we will want to play against the computer, we will be starting from scratch.