Most of it is based on the original C64 manual; this "step" movement is not mentioned at all, consider it an in-game trick you have to discover for yourself. Similar to the trick of luring the black ball into a robot to make it disappear (though that's "corrected" for the modern versions and doesn't work now iirc). As for putting the puzzles together, yeah I agree to a point, practice makes perfect and once you've had a play with the tools, it's becomes second nature how things work.
It's definitely a game with a rather high learning curve, but one that gets quite easier as you get the hang of things.
The "lure the black ball into a robot to get rid of it" trick does work in the classic mode of the DS version.
Ah okay, so they did keep that in the code (although it's just a C64 reskin rather than proper emulation), my memory was just failing a little. There are some changes to the defined "standard" as it were though, some of which I detailed in my review...
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/r_...iblemission_ds
That's not true. I never quite worked out how the checkerboard rooms worked; on some playthroughs they would seem to only hand out lift resets and not snoozes. The C64 version might have very well worked the same way; since there was no HUD, it was hard to tell.
Also, I never saw a robot change behavior mid-screen.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." --Bertrand Russel (attributed)
Interesting... every single game I only got snoozes from the checkerboard rooms. In the C64 version it alternates between the two types for each sequence "win".
I think how it works in the DS version is that there are 2 checkerboard rooms in the game. One hands out lift resets, the other hands out robot snoozes. I think.