Hacking in video games goes back a ways. In the Commodore 64 era there was “Hacker”, and its sequel “Hacker 2: The Doomsday Papers”. There were games that incorporated hacking as a component, such as “Impossible Mission”. More recently I enjoyed “Hack This Game”, “Hack This Game 2”, and “Hack This Game 3” (though the gameplay of the “Hack This Game” series owes more to the logic game mastermind than anything you might read about in the cult series of books “Stealing the Network”.
All of which brings us to a crazy reimagining of “Lawnmower Man” as a Gauntlet-style exploration/dungeon crawl called “Bit-Hacker”. The game has you actually moving around the network as a bit, one that keeps switching from “1” to “0” and back again. You fight enemy data, answer trivia questions, and enjoy the scenery (such as it is) as you explore computer systems. Mini games and data-on-data combat are what are on offer, and it’s not something that will awards for its graphical fidelity, but there’s something about it that left me unable to look away. Maybe it’s the tremendous amount of motion on screen, or maybe it’s a cyberpunk fantasy come to life, but whatever it is I deemed it worthy of 80 Microsoft Points.
Here’s what the developer (K7-Games) has to say about the game:
“Take on the role of a professional hacker who has finally released him/herself into the internet after many years of studying hacking. Fight your way through, avoiding viruses and worms – or even other hackers – along with breaking firewalls to reach your destination.”
Writings of Mass Deduction 