Jezzball (thing)

Jezzball. Jezzball! You remember Jezzball. That once ubiquitous game, you just must love it. Either that or you abhor it to your very being. A giant in its own days, this simple addictive game is becoming more and more a rarity these days.

Jezzball was originally programmed by Dima Pavlovsky of Marjacq Micro Ltd. Windows bought the Jezzball trademark in 1992. It was incorporated and found almost exclusively in the ever-popular Microsoft Entertainment Pack, a compilation of dozens of simple games from Windows. It usually was packaged with new computers, most often with Windows 95, during the early and mid 1990s. The game was especially predominant in places of education, where not-so-studious students would ignore their important paragraph-formatting class in order to play the game or something similar, like Maxwell's Maniac (also fantastic) or the awful Skifree... It was always fun to log on to the computer and see if you can beat the high score of the user previous to you. Sadly, Microsoft discontinued the manufacturing of the Entertainment Pack with Jezzball in 1996. Since then, there have been no upgrades or new versions. The game can no longer be bought from Microsoft but is widely available on the internets.

The game itself is very simple. You begin with a rectangular playing area, about 30 by 20 boxes. Two balls bounce around in the rectangle. You may click anywhere in the playing area, in hopes of getting rid of excess area. One does this by making a vertical or horizontal line which isolates a portion of the rectangle which does not contain a Jezzball. This section disappears and adds a percentage to the area cleared meter at the botom of the game screen. If a ball comes in contact with the line as it spreads across the screen, that half of the line is destroyed and you lose a life. When you clear 75% of the area, you move on to the next level. There is also a timelimit in which you must complete this objective.

A level to life to Jezzball to time chart is included below:

| LEVEL  |  #LIVES  | #JEZZBALLS  |   TIME   |
|   1    |     2    |      2      |   1500   |
|   2    |     3    |      3      |   1800   |
|   3    |     4    |      4      |   2000   |
|   4    |     5    |      5      |   2300   |
|   5    |     6    |      6      |   2500   |

The above is a steady trend for the endurance of the game. I believe there are forty-nine levels of this madness.

Here is some information included with the game from Microsoft:

On a far-off world, a new kind of atom has been discovered. It's called a Jezz, and you get paid galactic credits each time you trap one for shipment back to Earth. The Jezz atoms preserve their energy best when tightly confined, so the smaller the chamber you trap them in, the more galactic credits you acquire. The game begins in a large capture chamber with two Jezz atoms bouncing around. With a click of the mouse, you can build a new chamber wall and trap the Jezz atoms in a smaller space. But be careful, if you don't build your wall completely across the chamber before it's hit by a Jezz atom, it won't withstand the impact. Be forewarned, JezzBall is not just challenging and great fun, but also strangely soothing and satisfying. Once you start trapping atoms, you won't want to stop!

The object of JezzBall is to trap Jezz atoms in the smallest possible chambers. You make the chambers smaller with the wallbuilder. Watch the Jezz atoms closely. The challenge is to gauge enough time to anchor your wall on both sides of the chamber before it is struck by an atom. If only one side of your wall anchors before being hit by an atom, a partial wall is left behind but the cost is one chamber life. You advance to the next level when the walls you build reduce the chamber by at least 75 percent. If you reduce the chamber more than 75 percent, you are awarded extra points. Each time you advance a level, an additional Jezz atom is placed in the chamber. The more atoms you work with, the higher your points. If the atoms are moving too fast, you can slow them down, but you'll only earn half as many points.

There is a time limit for each game level in JezzBall. The more atoms at play in the capture chamber, the more time you are allotted for trapping them. The countdown clock is shown in the upper-right corner of the screen.

JezzBall computes your score based upon how much of the capture chamber you can eliminate.

• The chamber is divided into squares. You get points for each square that you eliminate, including those squares knocked out by the wallbuilder and empty areas that are cut off from the chamber. At the beginning level, with two atoms, and at slow speed, you receive 3.5 points for each square eliminated, 70 points for each vertical column, and 98 points for each horizontal column. At fast speed the points are doubled. The greater the number of atoms in the chamber, the more points you are awarded for each square that you eliminate.
• Bonus points are awarded at the completion of each level based upon how completely you eliminated the squares of the capture chamber. The first level of bonus points is given for each percent of space eliminated above 80 percent. The second level of bonus points kicks in for each percentage eliminated above 90 percent. These bonus points increase according to how many atoms are in play.

As I mentioned earlier, there are many locations where one can find and enjoy Jezzball. Here are some happy fun hyperlinks: