The game-board consists of a screen of differently-colored balls arranged in a matrix. There are five different colors: red, blue, green, yellow and purple. The player then clicks on any two or more connecting similarly-colored balls to eliminate them from the matrix, earning an appropriate number of points in the process. The more balls eliminated at once, the higher the points added to the player's score. The scoring can be expressed in the formula "Y=X". X represents the number of balls grouped together, Y is the resulting score. For example an elimination of 16 balls will result in 240 points. In the standard mode of the game, the game ends when the player has no more moves left; there are no more like-colored balls adjacent to each other. The screen immediately goes to the scoring screen, where statistics such as Average Score, Total Score and Games Played can be seen, along with a button that the player can press in order to start a new game.
Game Options and Modes
Breaker Set
The Breaker Set option allows the player to choose between Colorful Breakers and Greyscale Breakers. The first option is the default and sets the game balls' colors to the standard five colors. Choosing the latter changes the color palette and instead of differently-colored balls, the balls are adorned with various unique greyscale patterns allowing players with monochromaticPocket PCs to play the game, as well as players who may be colorblind and have trouble differentiating the colored balls from one another. Some of the patterns include lightly colored balls, dark grey balls and a white ball with a dark dot in the middle.
Game Styles
The player has four unique game styles to choose from, including Standard, which is described above. The other game styles are Continuous, Shifter and MegaShift.
Aside from being included in the Windows Mobile operating system, Jawbreaker is also distributed by Oopdreams Software, Inc. under another name, Bubblets. Bubblets is almost-identical to Jawbreaker, with some slight visual and semantic differences. Instead of balls, the player bursts bubbles, thus the name. Bubblets in this form is available for a much broader range of operating systems than the Jawbreaker version. The game is officially distributed as shareware for Pocket PC 2002/Windows Mobile 2003, Palm OS, and the Handheld PC Pro platforms. Bubblets is also available for desktop PCs, with the official Windows version of Bubblets, also distributed as expiring shareware. As Bubblets, the game was a finalist for the Best Puzzle Game category of Pocket PC Magazine's Pocket PC Award Winners of 2001, won by another SameGame clone called PocketPop produced by PocketFun. It was given the People's Choice Award in the same event. The Palm OS version of the game Bubblet, was favorably reviewed by PDAStreet's Palm Boulevard. Geek.com gave Bubblets a perfect score on their review and was named a Geek.com pick. The game has also been distributed as freeware for mobiles since June 2008. The mobile phone version, also called JawBreaker, was developed for those who did not have Jawbreaker-capable PDAs but had phones supporting Java ME. This iteration of the game could be run on mobile devices supporting Java ME CLDC 1.1/MIDP 2.0 with screen resolutions of 240×320 or 176×220. There is also a JavaScript online version published as Google Gadget.
