Demo Review
is a lot like "Jezz Ball" for young kids.
The
music is "Electronica" and the 4 tunes are pleasant enough. They were nice enough to set the music higher than the game sound effects, which always says something good about the game developers. But, if you want to turn the sound down do it from the options on the menu area, because, the keyboard settings to adjust the music will not affect the music once the game loads. Some games do , and some games don't.
Like Jezz Ball you have a gridded area that has balls when you start. In this case it's a large area with brightly colored balls . Your mouse left button makes vertical lines (up and down) and your right button makes horizontal lines (sideways). You make lines to seperate the area without hitting the balls . The smaller section is cleared away and replaced with a section of a picture you have just revealed. The pictures are animated scenes from stories. There is a hint of characters from popular TV Shows at the beginning opening of the game. But there are 27 drawings to uncover and they are different illustrations - not from the tv shows. I say it's for kids, because, I can see an older child or grown up betting tired of the same pictures.
"Custom Tailor" the images? Why yes!! Since, the pictures are numbered 0.jp 1.jpg 2.jpg etc you could replace the images with your own or add to them if you keep the numbering order, in that way the game starts fresh if you add to the pictures. It also makes a nice present for those in your household if you get the game and add family photos renaming them starting with the number 27.jpg and up . You would store the pictures to ProgramFiles/jezzonix/data/images. As long as you are "only adding pictures" you haven't violated any of those "reverse engineering" agreements that you agree to when you install.
There are three settings: easy, normal, and hard. In easy you have to clear away 91% of the board, normal it's 92% and hard it's 93%. There is slightly less time to clear an area also. In easy you start off with 1 minute and 35 seconds. You get ten seconds lesss on hard. It doesen't sound like much difference, but, it does make a difference in game play and getting past levels. After starting the game, in order to pause or go to the main menu press "escape". I like to throw that info in because, a lot of games have menues on the pages and some of our younger players might not know about the escape button. So, you can stop the game if you need to take a break for whatever reason. For demos it gives you more time to play if you don't have to stop and figure all this stuff out after you start.
Jezzonix diffrent than
Jezz Ball in that:
You start off with more than 2 balls
You have 5 lives after each level. Any lives you lost on a level you get back when the new level begins.
It's a lot easier.
The balls don't follow your cursor, so it's easier to place the lines.
You don't toggle between verticle and horrizontal since the right mouse button shoots lines sideways. So if you are used to playing the old style game it might throw you off at first because when you go to swith directions you have already shot the line and most likely hit a ball until you get used to it.
Of course, the graphics and music.
Jezz style games have a long term appeal because it is a basic concept. The original jezzball drew you in because it was so hard to reach high levels and you didn't want to admit you couldn't beat such an easy game. With out being terribly hard this game type is very enjoyable especially with the added graphics and modern features.
I give this game 3 and 1/2 stars
for being able to add you own pictures even though they didn't bother to mention it.
Other Jazz Ball Type games with High End Graphics are:
Cosmic Bugs
See game review with highscores on the full game
Water Bugs
See demo review See game review
Both - - 5 star games. I actually like Cosmic Bugs better than Water Bugs even though Water Bugs is the more recent and has more special powerup features in the game.
Download Jezzonix
Download Cosmic Bugs
Download Water Bugs
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