Blackout
Blackout is one of three new apps released together into the Palm Pre Apps Catalog. It is a simple game where the goal is to turn off all the lights. You are presented with a 5×5 grid of delicious-looking light bulbs. At the start of the game, a random selection of lights are already turned on, and your goal is to end up with all the lights turned off. Clicking on any light bulb toggles the state of adjacent bulbs except the ones that are diagonally adjacent (so any bulb that is vertically or horizontally adjacent will be toggled). Clicking on both a lit or dark bulb is allowed.
There are some configurations from which it is mathematically impossible to put out all the lights. The app shouldn’t present these, but it does. Furthermore, it doesn’t even warn the user when this occurs because the app simply doesn’t have the algorithm to do so. Some credit should go to the developers, since this game uses well-designed icons and doesn’t look garish or tacky. Hopefully updates will fix these “no-solution” states, until then you can have fun first wondering if you can actually turn out all the lights before actually trying to do so.
Tags: blackout, games, Mobile Phone, Palm Pre, Smartphone
Update: It turns out that with a 5×5 grid, only about a quarter of the initial configurations have a solution. If the developers had gone with a 6×6 grid, every single initial configuration would have a solution – maybe they’ll move to a 6×6 grid on the next update.
– Admin.
Not exactly true…
Impossible patterns have been removed from the game. While the 5×5 grid does indeed contain the mathematical possibility of making some patterns impossible, all of the patterns which actually show up are solvable. I have a tutorial page at http://www.GleesonArizona.com/blackout which will show anyone interested how to solve any pattern which appears.