Smash & Merge Balls

The pitch

Short Description: A skill-based arcade game with colorful physics. Full Description: In this game, you control a character that starts a fusion chain reaction! Strike the colorful balls to get them moving. The key rule: when two balls of the same color collide, they merge, and you earn points. Create massive chains of mergers to maximize your high score! (lore) (from the Showman): Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls! Welcome to the greatest show in the cosmos — the Arena of Fusion! Here is your instrument of chaos — the mighty merger mallet! Don't be shy, give it a swing! Your mission is brilliantly simple: step onto the arena floor and prepare for a rainbow deluge! Smash those colorful spheres, make them crash, and when two of the same color meet — BOOM! — they fuse into a glorious explosion of points!

Controls & how it runs

-Use the "WASD" or the "touchscreen joystick" to move -Use the "Space" or the "touch-screen button" to dash -Use "left mouse button" or "Touch screen button" to Hit -Hit the balls and collide the balls of the same color to score points, when they collide they create another ball of random color.

Getting a run going takes exactly one press: Press start, up top, and the game boots inside this page — nothing downloads in the background and no form wants your details before the first jump. The cabinet is drawn for a landscape (wide) screen and listens to mouse, keyboard or touch, whichever the game prefers. This cabinet runs wide: landscape screens flatter it, so tip a phone on its side or hand it a tablet or desktop and let it stretch out. Given a fullscreen button, use it — scores look better at full size, that's just science.

Pro tips for arcade cabinets

• Treat your first run as a scouting mission. Arcade cabinets hide their cruelty in the second minute, not the first — learn where the difficulty spikes before you start chasing numbers.
• Small scores compound. Grab the easy pickups on every pass instead of gambling the whole run on one heroic line; heroes respawn, banked points don't evaporate.
• Watch the edges of the screen. In classic arcade design the next problem almost always enters from somewhere you weren't looking — build the habit of scanning the borders.

Smash & Merge Balls — quick-fire questions

Does Smash & Merge Balls cost anything to play?

Not a token. The cabinet is free from the first run to the five-hundredth — no wallet, no sign-up, no toll booth hiding three levels in. The adverts around the page are what keep the floor's lights on.

What sort of game is Smash & Merge Balls?

It stands on our Arcade row — that's the family it plays most like. The pitch above is the publisher's own rundown of what it throws at you and what it hands back.

Can I play Smash & Merge Balls on my phone?

Happily, yes. It runs inside the browser on phones and tablets the same way it does on a computer. This cabinet runs wide: landscape screens flatter it, so tip a phone on its side or hand it a tablet or desktop and let it stretch out.

Do I need to install anything first?

Nothing whatsoever. Smash & Merge Balls is an HTML5 game: hit the start button and it boots on this page, and shutting the tab sweeps the cabinet clean behind you.

Before you wander off

Personal best banked, or still chasing it? Either way the full Arcade row is powered on and waiting — The main floor: 415 cabinets of pure arcade stock — the quick, the loud and the gloriously unfair. If it beeps, flashes and dares you to beat a number, it lives on this row.