Rules
A level always began with three red segments attached to the creature's head. Eating any red balls with only these segments attached would not cause the animal to grow. Eating any other colored ball caused it to attach as a segment to the tail end of the creature, as did eating a red ball with segments of any other color already on the animal.
A player could clear segments off the animal by attaching three balls of the same color to its tail. This could be done by simply eating three of the same color in a row, or by eating one or two of one color, eating three of another (clearing them), then eating a third (or a second and a third) of the original color. The importance of shortening the body was twofold: a longer creature ran a more dangerous risk of running into itself and dying immediately; also, if a player cleared the board while the character's body was too long (indicated by a number in the corner of the screen), the player failed (lost a life) and had to restart the level.
Read more about this topic: Space Ball (game)
Famous quotes containing the word rules:
“Alas! when Virtue sits high aloft on a frigate’s poop, when Virtue is crowned in the cabin of a Commodore, when Virtue rules by compulsion, and domineers over Vice as a slave, then Virtue, though her mandates be outwardly observed, bears little interior sway.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The great challenge which faces us is to assure that, in our society of big-ness, we do not strangle the voice of creativity, that the rules of the game do not come to overshadow its purpose, that the grand orchestration of society leaves ample room for the man who marches to the music of another drummer.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“... cooking is just like religion. Rules don’t no more make a cook than sermons make a saint.”
—Anonymous, U.S. cook. As quoted in I Dream a World, by Leah Chase, who was quoted in turn by Brian Lanker (1989)