Obsessed With Bejeweled Blitz

I’ve chronicled my passionate love for Bejeweled Blitz here a couple of times. If I have a few minutes to kill at work, or just need to zone out and clear my head, I’ll log on to Facebook and play a few rounds. There’s something about the falling jewels stacking up and clearing out, and the Bejeweled announcer rooting me on that relaxes me.

And then the developers upped the ante. Last Tuesday they released an updated version. It was already an addiction for me, but now the jewels are more dazzling, the sounds are all tinkly and crystally, and the announcer gets really worked up when you do well! “Good Job!” “Excellent!” Really, everyone should hear those words once or twice a day.

They also added a few new way to rack up points. They already had the Hypercube, which appears when you line up five of the same jewels. Click on that and then click on any one jewel next to it and it clears ALL of the jewels of that color off the board. To jack up the points they added the Flame, too, which gives you a flashing jewel if you line up four of the same color. You can either match that with two more of the same to get a bunch of points or if you don’t, you still get a bunch points at the end just for being on the board.

Then they added the best feature—The Last Hurrah! And that’s exactly what it is. When the game ends, it automatically searches through possible matches and finishes them off for you, giving you gajillions of bonus points.

Overall, I think each match is worth more too because I seem to bet getting a ton of scores like this:

Still can't get the 150K badge...

I’m insanely competitive about this. You can see your friends’ scores and I get jealous when they hit 200K, 250K…and I get determined to beat them. I realized I had a serious problem today when I walked away from my computer after playing for 5 minutes…um, okay 25…and my eyes were red, watery and glassy. I had to cut myself off. And then 15 minutes later I was jonesing to play again.

The worst part? Every Tuesday the scores clear out and you start over. I hate Tuesdays.