SameGame

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The Same Game running on GNOME

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 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 in Japanese. It is also distributed for the Palm PDA under the name of Bubblet and for Windows Mobile 2003 as "Jawbreaker".

1 Game play
2 Scoring
3 Versions
4 External links

[edit] Game play

There is a rectangular playing screen initially filled with several, typically 4 or 5, kinds of blocks at random. By selecting one of a group of adjoined blocks, a player may remove them from the screen. 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 no more blocks can be removed, as in the right screen of the figure:

...........     ...........
. X       .     .         .
.#X X     . --> .  X      .
.XXO#X    .     .#O#X     .
...........     ...........

[edit] 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 $n 2 - 3 n + 4$ . The Bubble Breaker implementation for Windows Mobile uses the $n (n - 1)$ formula.

Some versions also offer a large bonus for removing all the blocks on the screen. Yet others reduce the final score based on the number of blocks remaining at the end of the game.

[edit] 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.

A JavaScript verison of SameGame with HighScore boards can be played at http://www.arcticferret.com/g0at/index.php?g=1

Hudson Soft made several versions of SameGame for the Super Famicom, featuring Mario, Bomberman or Tengai Makyou characters. It has also popped up on the Game Boy platform under the name BreakThru by Spectrum Holobyte.
A version of SameGame for Palm OS is available from Quick's PDA Software.
A smaller, less complex version for Windows Mobile phones is called Bubble Breaker.
A KDE version called KSame, written by Stephan Kulow, is available at KDE Games under Tactics & Strategy.
Another version of this game written with C# programming language by Caner Şahan can be downloaded from his Personalized Home Page.
A JavaScript implementation of the game was written by Fatih Akdag and can be played on his web page.
A Flash implementation of the game was written by Jussi Kari and can be played on his web page.
A port for J2ME-enabled devices, done by Andreas Gustafsson, can be download from his Home Page.
A port of SameGame was released on the TiVo Series 2 platform DVR in 2006.
JT's Blocks, available on Yahoo! Games is reminiscent of SameGame, with the addition of scattered tiles that scramble the colors on adjoining tiles.
Pogo.com has an "upside-down" version of the game, called Poppit. The game Collapse is heavily modeled after SameGame. ColorJunction, a game that appears as an option on Google's Personalized Homepage, is a tribute to ChainShot.
Simon Tatham has included SameGame in his Portable Puzzle Collection, which runs on Unix with the GTK , Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X and also includes 23 other puzzle games. James Harvey has ported this collection to Palm OS, including SameGame.