Cubes: the SameGame with a twist

There is one more SameGame implementation (besides the numerous ones discussed in my previous post) that I think deserves a separate posting: Cubes. There is also a lite version with only four levels to try it out, and a free ad-supported full version – though this free version does not (yet) seem to be available in all iTunes stores. As one might figure out from the illustration, Cubes is a 3 dimensional SameGame implementation. Although this seems to be just a little step further, this turns out to be a really capturing puzzle with good clarity.

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Chain Shot! – the SameGame over and over again

The first kind of sequential removal puzzles that I will discuss is the computer game Chain Shot! and its derivatives. Chain Shot! was developed originally by Kuniaki Moribe in 1985 for the Fujitsu FM-8/7 series, and ported to UNIX under the name of Same Game in 1992 by Eiji Fukumoto. This puzzle is probably one of the most ported/cloned puzzle programs available for computers, known under many different names (see a list of pre-2000 ports on wikipedia). Later, it got ported to Windows Mobile where the same game is known as either Jawbreaker, Bubble Breaker, Bubblet or Bubblets. And now it has come to the iPhone, and again the same game is popping up over and over again. The basic principle is actually really nice (Biedl et al. 2001 is an analysis of its complexity is, showing that it is NP complete), but do we really need dozens of versions of this?