Bigfrog Weblog

Jawbreaker is now closing in on 1,000,000 games played for the original, 12x11 board. The game first became popular on this site in April 2006. Since then, thousands of games are played every day.

Check out the latest stats for more information (now updated live -- see the green boxes).

Posted by Steven Spencer at 7:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

They're coming. A year after Microsoft's XBox360 launch, Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3 are coming this month.

Nintendo Wii wins in price, motion controller and family games, whereas the others are all about blood, gore and graphics.

I'm so getting this one.

Posted by Steven Spencer at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While I was busy working on a second game, Google released their "widgets" for web sites. So with little work, I've added the following games to http://jawbreaker.ws/:

• Bejeweled - switch jewels on the board to get 3, 4 or 5 in a row. I've been playing this for the last 2 weeks.
• Flood It - try to fill the board with one color (starting from the top left corner) by clicking on the adjacent color. You only have 25 moves.
• Simon - copy the sequence of lights (and sounds) to test your short term memory. I actually had one of these devices as a child.

Check them out. They meet my criteria for games: they're simple, fun and addicting!

Posted by Steven Spencer at 9:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jawbreaker is growing too popular for the sleepy confines of BigFrog. Thanks to Suzy's suggestion, we went hunting Friday night and came up with . . . jawbreaker.ws.

What's the WS you ask? WS stands for Web Site, but really, WS is assigned to the island nation of Samoa. Read the WS Story to hear how two entrepreneurs tried to convince the King of Samoa to allow the domain's wider use.

Why the WS you ask? Because the COM, NET, ORG and US are taken. So the other option was to choose something different by appending a word like jawbreakerplayer.com or prepending a letter like ejawbreaker.com. Not our favorite options.

So head on over and check it out. I'm calling it a beta just in case, but I think it works. High scores too high? You can always try for a personal best.

Posted by Steven Spencer at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Attention all nieces and nephews with MySpace accounts (that makes 4 of you). Your ole Uncle Steve has a MySpace profile for his game Jawbreaker and needs as many friends as possible on MySpace. Please add jawbreakergame as a friend on your MySpace account.

Thanks.

Posted by Steven Spencer at 6:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jawbreaker is going thru a version 1.1 rewrite and I thought it would be fun to see what improvments players mosted wanted to see. A lot of the improvements will be behind the scenes, like faster loading time (learning lots at the day job) and improved database schema. But for the visible changes, I wanted to get a sense what Jawbreaker players are most interested in. So I took some time out and added a survey system. The results are in:

What new feature would you like to see the most?

Posted by Steven Spencer at 4:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)