Nithin Kamath's Weblog

Last weekend I have been to my hometown (Mangalore) and that Saturday being the Cricket World Cup final I was shocked to see a small tournament being organized for local area teams at the katte (small ground) near my house. It was held as a night event meaning that the matches started only after 10:00pm, which was not surprising considering that during day time Mangalore gets pretty hot and humid; pretty much impossible to play in those conditions. Hence night cricket was a good idea.

The rules for this mini tournament were pretty simple:

• Each team got 4 overs to play.
• The bowling was to be done underarm and from the spot (i.e. bowler is not supposed to come running and bowl).
• If the batsmen hit the ball outside the circle for a six, he would be out and his team would get no runs for it.

Pretty simple rules for everyone to understand and play. There were numerous games which got played and I hear that the matches went on till 8:00 in the morning, which is pretty much shows how many teams were playing and how much people are crazy about cricket.

The winners went home with a cash prize of Rs. 3000 and runners up with Rs.1500, I am not sure of the amount. But I am still wondering how could such cricket crazy people not be watching the world cup final; must be that they were sure Australia would emerge winners. Anyways it is nice to see such events happening in the town, which you wouldn’t see in larger cities like Bangalore.

Weekends are usually boring and sleepy, so what do you do for some fun, well you can play computer games for timepass. So from now on whenever I find a good game I will be doing a write up on some of the small and simple games which offer awesome playability. This week I will be writing about Classic Clickomania developed by Matthias Schussler.

Clickomania (Classic) has a very simple objective, as the author puts it:
“Your goal is to remove as many stones as possible by clicking on groups of stones with the same color. Sounds easy? I can tell you that it is harder than you might think… “

The game looks simple and you might ask what is so challenging in this game. Well it all comes down to the purpose you want to play it for, if you are playing for time-pass and fun then just go on clicking and try you luck and get best scores. But if you really want to clear all the blocks then you will have to be very clever calculating the impact of each removal, this is where it gets a bit tricky, complex and very challenging. This game can be played by all age groups, which is a big plus point.

The playability of the game is also good, one can set the rows and cols required in the playing field, the height of each stone, the no of stone patterns and various other configuration settings. Since the stone layout pattern is randomly generated, each game is different from the previous one, hence achieving good scores consistently is quite a difficult job and gives a boost to the playability of the game.

To test the game I played it five times, my worst score was 35 blocks and the best was 1 blocks. So that makes me a good player huh

Here are the plus points of the game:

• High playability (do not get bored of playing it even after playing it many times)
• Small download size (450+ KB)
• Minimal system requirements, hence will run on any PC.
• No installation is required, one just has to unzip it.
• Available for multiple platforms, right from mobile phones to Linux and Unix variants using java technology.
• Many configuration options provided.
• It’s a freeware!

The only minus point of the game which i found was that, I did not like the interface of the new version of the game, the old interface (classic) was much better and easier to use.

Links:
URL: http://www.clickomania.ch/click/ClassicClick.html
Size: 483 KBytes
System Requirements: Windows NT/2000/ XP/95/98/ME
License: Freeware

What do you feel about the game, did you like it? Let me know by leaving the comments below.