(Fathom It!, TUCOWS product #211820)
| "While Battleship was fun, you always needed a buddy to play. With Fathom It! that aspect is gone since it uses a mix of Minesweeper and Battleship for a single-player puzzle. "You are given the sizes of the ships in a small window that appears on the right side of the screen. Use the sizes to mark spots and find all of the ships. "While not a groundbreaking title, Fathom It! definitely has a way of getting you addicted." -==KapTeNKrYloN==- |
I realize reviewers have heavy schedules and cannot always give a product the reviewing time it needs. I'm afraid, however, that the reviewer here completely missed what
Fathom It! is. It is NOT a single-player version of the search-and-sink game we played in school -- there are scores of such shareware applications out there today. Fathom It! is a solitaire logic puzzle based on the extremely popular battleship puzzle genre published in quality puzzle magazines around the world (e.g.,
GAMES, World of
Puzzles, BreinBreker, Sekaibunka). With Fathom It! there is no guessing-and-praying. Each Fathom It! board is a specially crafted puzzle solved purely by logical deduction. Just take a look at
chess-like analyses of Fathom It!
puzzles.
Here are some inaccuracies in the review:
Fathom It! has nothing in common with Minesweeper. Digits within a Minesweeper puzzle denote the number of neighboring ship segments. In Fathom It!, digits are located outside of the board, and denote the total number of ship segments along a row or column.
You are not given the size of the ships (the ships on the right are always there, and denote the ship fleet to be found), but rather the number of
ship segments along a given row or column.
While I believe "Fathom It!" is a clever double-entendre (a fathom is a naval measurement, and the "fathom it" in English means to figure something out), the comment is irrelevant to the review.
As the premier Windows adaptation of this fascinating puzzle genre on the
Internet, Fathom It! remains the preeminent solitaire battleship game program, and continues to receive rave reviews by renowned puzzle gurus
(just check out what luminaries in the puzzle world write about Fathom It!).
Fathom It! bundles within an incredible way to learn the art of solving Fathom It! puzzles: it has a built-in rule-based expert system that will provide a complete hint, in lucid English, for any Fathom It! puzzle, in any situation.
Here's the description I provide for Fathom It!:
FATHOM IT! v1.2 <ASP> - Fathom It!, a logical puzzle, is a fascinating Windows version of GAMES Magazine's column "Battleships". Unlike the classic pencil-and-paper game of battleship, Fathom It! boards are solved using logical deduction only. You'll find Fathom It! board solutions have a chess-like beauty. Try solving a Fathom It! board or two and see why. Registered version comes with 32,000 boards, divided into easy, intermediate, hard and expert categories. Fathom It! packs within it a groundbreaking rule-based expert system to provide the player with a hint, in lucid English anytime, anywhere. Windows 3.x and up, with color/gray scale/monochrome display modes. Resizes up to entire screen, ideal for vision-impaired users.
It is my belief that the previous reviewer (whom I was told, no longer works for TUCOWS) did not understand the product at all. If your current reviewer will take a new look at Fathom It!, s/he will realize that the current review in TUCOWS does not do justice to the product. With your permission, I would like to request a reevaluation of my product's description.
Thanking you for your time,
Moshe Rubin
Mountain Vista Software
mosher@mountainvistasoft.com
http://www.mountainvistasoft.com
Created on: 28 November 2005