Snood, the Simple Game

Greg Costikyan has penned a Snood screed that bears reading for anyone into game design. I gave Snood a try a couple of years ago when I read that Woz was hooked on it. Fun. I've played it on and off since then. But the ninth most popular game in 2001? That's nuts. Is Snood part of a series of tiny puzzley games, like Tetris and Bejeweled, that can still do well in a world of Counterstrikes and Unreal Tournaments? Is there still the chance for an individual or small team to strike it rich writing a game like this (maybe for cell phones)? Or is the engagingly simple game doomed to extinction? M : The Snood-equivalent for Linux is Frozen Bubble.

Frozen bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

A RIP OFF of the Bust a move game.

Puzzle Bobble

[Snover]

Snood is primarily a cheap rip-off of the arcade game Puzzle Bobble (aka Bust-a-Move in the USA). Mame [mame.dk] does an excellent job of playing the ORIGINAL versions, and there are also plenty of less "hacked" alternative (by hacked, I mean that Snood has removed a lot of the original features of the game that made it really fun).

Bust a Move Rip Off?

[Flamesplash]

Isn't Snood just a rip off of Bust a Move [ign.com]? I heard of Bust a Move long before Snood. Or is this one of those occassions where Bust a Move is the rip off and happens to be more well known.

Snoodling? Isn't that a gaysexual thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Snoodling: When an uncircumcised homo pulls his extra foreskin over the cock of another homo and proceeds to jerk him off. Those gays have way too much free time. Can be used at as a great derogatory term as in, "You Snoodler!"

http://www.number-one-adult-sexual-health-terms- ad visor.com/obsecure.htm

Dont forget bubble bobble

[Anonymous Coward]

The ORIGINAL game where the green monster from bust a move came from. I owned the commodore 64 version, and it was a VERY addictive platformer, which imho pushed a lot onto a small cassete.

I never completed all 100 levels, But its still a legendary game that deserves a mention.

blatant plug

[kisrael]

My contribution to the 'amazingly simple game' genre are game buttons [kisrael.com], reasonably rich games each played entirely within a single CGI form grey pushbutton, as both controller and display. I still come back to these every once in a while, especially Dashteroids and Happy Eater.

Re:Bust a Move Rip Off?

[boinger]

That was my immediate thought, too - some quick Googling shows that the original Bust A Move was an English conversion of a Japanese game "Puzzle Bobble" - the copyrights for Bust A Move go back to 1994.

So, the question is, when is Snood from?

Re:NOT just a bust-a-move clone

[Anonymous Coward]

IGN is dead wrong about Snood, as is whomever thought that Frozen Bubble is equivalent. There are two seemingly small differences between Snood and the Puzzle Bobble series, but they make all the difference in the world.

The first difference is the lack of any timing element. This gives Snood a meditative quality unlike Bust-a-Move, which uses power bubbles and other flashy gimmicks as a crutch to make up for dull game fundamentals.

More importantly, Snood's danger bar can be ROLLED BACK. This makes Snood an infinitely more complex and strategic game than Bust-a-Move; you don't need perfect aim or lucky pieces to win, just great thinking. To use another video game analogy: it's the difference between someone who uses ticks and cheap combos to play Street Fighter II, and someone who can win without throwing a single hadouken.

There are just enough really subtle touches in Snood that I think Dave Dobson really understands game design. His earlier (Mac-only) game, Centaurian, is an outstanding tribute to Bosconian as well as every classic video game of the 80's.

I do pity the poor Windows users who have to put up with crapware like Gator to install Snood, though. The original Mac version never had any spyware, and I don't expect the Mac OS X version to, either.

Bust-A-Move

[matticus]

I remember throwing quarters into Bust-a-move like 8 years ago. Then last year, someone asked me if i had heard of "Snood," supposedly the "most addictive game ever". Surprisingly enough, it's not near as good as Bust-A-Move even though it's a DIRECT RIPOFF and as far as I can tell, the little Bubble Bobble dinosaurs don't get any money from the probably $12 the Snood creators made from including spyware in the game. It's disgusting. Which would you rather play, a game with the bubbly goodness of the dinosaurs, or a crappy ripoff that pops up ads? Give me a break. Frozen Bubble stays relatively true to the original Bust-A-Move, and it's Free, so check that out, but please, for the love of everything that is good, inform EVERYONE you know who has ever heard of Snood that it is a crappy ripoff of Bust-A-Move and it should be called Bust-A-Move, if only to make people aware that Bust-A-Move exists. Please.

Re:Bust a Move Rip Off?

[Lazlo Nibble]

Snood is the rip-off of Bust-A-Move (a/k/a Puzzle Bobble [klov.com], et al.). The fact that so few people seem to recognize this kind of reinforces the original author's point about the recent obscurity of the puzzle-game genre.

Re:Bust-A-Move

[matticus]

oh, and I'm aware that puzzle bobble came before bust-a-move, but they're the same game. Bust-a-move is just the american name for it.

For Zaurus users...

[dr_dank]

there is Froot [unc.edu]. Definitely a must for Zaurus gamers who like Snood.

Ad-Aware out of date

[thenightfly42]

Ad-Aware is critically out of date, and therfore dangerous, according to SpyWareInfo [spywareinfo.com]. It's expected to be "out of commission" until February for the free version. He recommends Spybot [eon.net.au] in the meantime.

Re:Frozen bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

Puzzle Bobble is just the Japanese name for Bust-A-Move. There were copyright issues when it was first released in America, so the name was changed. Nothing underhanded going on.

I happen to know the guy who wrote Snood

[mistcat]

The author of Snood, Dave Dobson, is a professor where I went to College [guilford.edu]. From what I understand from talking with him and people who asked him about it in school, he wrote it just for fun and figured he might make a couple hundred bucks over the lifetime of the game from the few people gracious enough to register the game. Its hard to believe how the game has taken off. I think this is more a triumph of the internet and the ways an uncontrolled distribution channel can let just about anyone into the marketplace. There are plenty of markets where cost of getting into the distribution channels alone is enough to stifle meaningful competition. Just read Charles H. Ferguson's High Stakes, No Prisoners for an example.

I think another thing to consider is that the internet doesn't just allow for originality or quality but also popularity. I think its sobering to realize that even in the anti-clique of the open source movement there is a lot pressure to conform to certain world views and also to tear down what's popular. (I'm sure everyone who posts to slashdot with a @aol.com address can attest to that) I'm sure there are games with better graphics and maybe better game play than snood out there, but I think a lot of peoples reflex reaction is to attack snood simply because its not necessarily the very first game of its kind. The problem is that without popular products, even ones that are not the best of their breed, some markets will never get wide exposure. I think that most genre's of software benefit immeasurably from exposure, it almost always spurs competition and I'm sure there will be bigger,faster,stronger snood that I'll hear about on slashdot in another year.

Re:whatever

[insanecarbonbasedlif]

I used to play multiplayer tetris on the LAN at work. There were bonus pieces that let you do good things like eliminate rows from the bottom of the screen or bad things like drop random blocks on someone's screen

It was team based and you generally had to use your good blocks on an ally who's in trouble. We'd play it for hours at a time, and we were enjoying it and socializing, not too numbed to stop. Since we were all in the same room, it was like a LAN party. Occasionally, even the managers would play.

Was it by chance called tetrinet [tetrinet.org]? That game ruled.

Re:Dont forget bubble bobble

[RichardX]

"It was followed with an incredibly poor sequel: Rainbow Islands, which as legend has it, was rushed to production in 2 weeks after the developers sat around doing nothing while they were being paid to do a Bubble Bobble sequel."

Wash your mouth out, filthy heathen!!
Rainbow Islands was ace. I wore a hole in my hand with a Konix Navigator joystick I played it so much on my Atari ST.

Sure, the concept was guff, and it wasn't all that polished at first glance, but once you explored it's hidden depths - it had at LEAST twice as many secret bonuses, etc as Bubble Bobble.. Hell, even now I remember that every third enemy you killed gave you a special.. I think the order was red pot x 3 (extra rainbow), yellow pot (fast fire), trainers/sneakers (move fast), super-special.. and if you crushed an enemy with a rainbow they turned into a gem.. depending on where you crushed them, they'd fly a different way, and where they landed dictated the colour of the gem.. get 'em all, and you open the secret level... and on, and on..

I can't believe it was rushed in 2 weeks. To this day it remains one of the most secret packed arcade games I've ever played!

Anyways, yeah. Big long ramble, sorry. Just had to stick up for this much maligned game tho :)

Warning!! Snood installs Bonzai Buddy!!

[permaculture]

Gee thanks guys. I downloaded Snood and it installed BonzaiBuddy on my machine. Now I have to run AdAware to kill it, which takes ages.

Just a warning for those of us who prefer to avoid smegware.

Re:Good Design, Annoying Installation

[joe52]

I used to play Snood on my mac several years ago. I even registered my copy. I agree that the current version (at least the Windows installer) is so loaded with useless software that I don't want that I would tell anyone not to install it.

What I don't understand is why on earth the author started bundling that garbage with his game. I would have thought that with the popularity of the game that he would have sold plenty of licenses. I understand that only a small percentage of users will ever pay for a piece of shareware, but I would have thought that with the kind of volume that he has that there would be enough money in it without the spyware. Between the popups on their web site and the spyware in the installer I'm amazed that anyone would think highly enough of the author to actually pay for a registration code.