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SameGame is a
puzzle game originally invented as 'Chain Shot!' in
1985 by Kuniaki Moribe (Morisuke,) which was distributed for Fujitsu
FM-8/7 series in a Japanese monthly personal computer magazine called
Gekkan ASCII.
The game was afterwards redistributed under the name of 'SAME GAME' in
1992 for UNIX platforms by Eiji Fukumoto (Kyoto,) followed by the one
for NEC
PC-9801 series by Wataru Yoshioka (W. Yossy.) The latter spread very
quickly and widely in Japan and soon was ported to various platforms, both
in free and commercially. 'SAME GAME' is pronounced as sah-meh-gah-meh
(of course as usual all in short vowels) in
Japanese. It is also distributed for the Palm PDA under the name of
Bubblet.
Game play
You have a rectangular playing screen initially filled with several,
typically 4 or 5, kinds of blocks at random. Choosing adjoined blocks of a
kind, by selecting one of them, you can remove them from the screen and
the usual gravity action takes place. A column without any blocks will be
trimmed away by other columns sliding to the left. Usually, there will be
no time constraints in the game; however, some implementations gradually
push the rows upward or drop blocks from above. The game is over if you
cannot remove any blocks, as in the right screen of the figure:
........... ...........
. X . . .
.#X X . --> . X .
.XXO#X . .#O#X .
........... ...........
A basic scoring rule
Every version of the game offers the following scoring rule:
- On removing n blocks, you get (n - k)2
points, where k = 1 or 2 depending on the implementation.
Objective
It can be played for two distinct objectives:
- To connect the blocks of a kind as many as possible (to make a big
score.)
- To remove all the blocks in the screen (usually resulting in
considerable bonus.)
Remark
As you see, the game has only one user action and corresponding basic
scoring rule. It is this simplicity that let it spread so quickly.
Versions
Martin Hock released Insane Game for the
Texas Instruments TI-86 graphing calculator, adding a mode that drops
new tiles onto the board with a gradually increasing pace and ends the
game when the board is full. Bill Nagel ported it to the TI-83, and
Damian Yerrick ported it to the PC.
It has also popped up on the
Game Boy platform under the name BreakThru by Spectrum Holobyte.
If you like SameGame, you may also like
Yoshi's Cookie and other
puzzle games.
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