Same Game has very little crippling on it. In the Demo version you cannot Undo your last move, and you are reminded that your copy is unregistered when you first run the game. Other than that, it is fully working with no other limits. It is not time limited to 30 days either.
Registering Same Game costs $7 (about £5) and can be done through Handango. Here is the direct link to register Same Game. Note that I am using an affiliate link, so a portion of the fee is given to All About Symbian to help them continue to run their information site.
Please feel free to copy and use these images in any news articles or reviews you post about Same Game. A quick email to me letting me know you are using them would be nice, but isn't required.
A New Game
Almost The End
Title Screen
A lot of people are going to know me for my applications released by FreEPOC - the distinction of all of those apps (Vexed, SFCave, Quad, etc) are that they are freeware. In fact, for the first time, I'm releasing an application as shareware. Why?
Part of it is I want to see how popular a shareware app can be, when compared to a freeware app. I reckon that Vexed and Same Game are about the same level of playability and addictivness. But I've been as open as possible. The only missing feature in the demo is the Undo function. You can play the demo forever as it has no time limit on it. You'll just get a note at the start saying "Please Register..."
And there is the money side of it. If 150 people out there decide to register Same Game (that's 1% of the projected downloads of the demo over the first 3 months), then that's earnings of around £1,000. Now ask yourself, if that happens am I going to (a) sit back and retire or (b) write something just as good (if not better) and release that next month?
The choice is yours.
I'm on a train from Edinburgh back to London on Sunday, and as I pull out of Waverley I thought to myself I want to play SameGame on my 7650. Now there are a ton of versions of SameGame (including TileFall on the Psion Series 3 and 5's), and a few Java Midlet versions are kicking around. But they were all missing something.
So out comes the 9210 and the OPL Program editor and I start coding.
Same Game is a wonderful example of OPL as a Rapid Application Development tool. In a few hours, the nuts and bolts of the game were completed (2 hours). Then the polish in the gameplay (and a sligh rework on the graphics (another hour). Finally, a decent intro screen and hooks for the Demo version (2 hours) and you have an application coded in 5 hours.
And out of that, probably 4 and a half hours were on the 9210 - nowhere near a Desktop PC!
But ddon't let the speed of writing fool you - the game will hold you entranced for months.
Well, it's going to happen, isn't it. So before you decide that the Undo Function is worth hacking around or looking for an illegal download site - rather than support myself and encourage me to write more software for the Symbian OS, please consider the following. If a decent number of you register Same Game, I'll carry on writing. If I see it warezed everywhere, I'll know I'm wasting my time and I'll go out and do something else instead.