Video games - SameGame

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	Video games - SameGame

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 . ........... ...........

Scoring

Most versions of the game give

(n-k)^2

points for removing n tiles at once, where k = 1 or 2 depending on the implementation. For instance, Insane Game for TI calculators uses

(n-1)^2

. Ikuo Hirohata's implementation uses the formula

n^2-3n+4

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 Wikipedia editor Damian Yerrick ported it to the PC.

It has also popped up on the Game Boy platform under the name BreakThru by Spectrum Holobyte.

Hudson Soft made several versions of SameGame for the Super Famicom, featuring Mario, Bomberman or Tengai Makyou characters.

Pogo.com has an "upside-down" version of the game, called Poppit.

The game Collapse is heavily modeled after SameGame.

ColorJunction, an game that appears as an option on Google's Personalized Homepage, is a tribute to ChainShot.

If you like SameGame, you may also like Yoshi's Cookie and other puzzle games.

A version of SameGame for Palm OS is available from .

A new version of this game written with C# programming language by Caner Şahan from Turkey. This game can be download from .

A KDE version called KSame, written by Stephan Kulow, is available at under Tactics & Strategy.

A port of SameGame was released on the TiVo Series 2 platform DVR in 2006.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for SameGame ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article SameGame; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

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