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 (Kyoujin,) 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.

Table of contents 1 Game play 2 A basic scoring rule 3 Objective 4 Remark 5 Versions 6 References

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.

References

• Insane Game, part of freepuzzlearena (http://www.cs.rose-hulman.edu/~yerricde/b/). A SameGame implementation for PCs using the Allegro library.