Students
Classic Cell Phone Snake
snake on a cell phone
As I thought of e-games or sims to write about for this month’s post, I tried to think of games that really held my attention but were in fact quite simple. I almost immediately thought of Snake, which I (and many others I’m sure) used to play on my cell phone several years back. This game was one that actually came for FREE on your phone and required the use of either the arrow buttons or the numbers ( 2,4, 6 and 8 ) to direct the snakes movement. As the snake moved around, you needed to guide it to ‘eat’ the flower looking item on the screen to increase the snakes length, which in turn increased your points and level. If your snake ended up eating its tail, then the game was over.
Performance feedback was an integral part of this game as you could see the snake growing (and speeding up) as you progressed through the game. I found that challenge and curiosity also played a big role in motivating me to play this game – I knew that if I lost, I would have to start over from the beginning. It was fun to see how long the snake would actually get… could it get to a point that it was too long and the game would end itself? I never figured that one out.
February 4th, 2010 at 3:09 am
Simply Amazing!I love this game.I always play this game to get out of stress and on the harder level.It’s simplicity is what makes it so much fun.It takes considerable concentration so you don’t get bored easily and once you start it’s hard to stop.
February 5th, 2010 at 9:40 am
i think the snake game is and always was a good way to show functional programming versus linear. you can’t go straight from linear/goto style to OO, you have to understand functions first. once you get it functional, the point at which objects become more useful than straight functions is when you need to reuse code through an inheritance hierarchy. the simplest possible snake game doesn’t need those properties, but add just about any amount of complexity and you soon find them invaluable…