Downloads

What do you get when you blend pachinko, pinball, breakout, and crying unicorns? Peggle, one of the newest addictions--I mean games--from Popcap Games, a company which is probably responsible for more lost productivity than the "IloveYou" virus, and I mean that in the best way possible.

Peggle has a simple premise: Aim a ball at the top of a screen full of colored pegs. The ball bounces. Each time it hits a peg, the peg vanishes. Make all the orange pegs vanish, and you go on to the next level. The ball drops off the screen once it runs out of bouncing energy, and you shoot off a new one. Run out of balls before you clear all the orange pegs, and you begin the level anew. If you are fortunate enough to catch the ball as it exits the screen, you get a free ball.

Ah, but then it begins to get tricky. In just the first half of the game's ten stages, I encountered pins which would cause the screen to spawn flippers, or 'explode' (taking out many surrounding pins), or even cause the ball to re-enter the screen after it dropped off the bottom.

The main game is broken into stages of five levels each, with each stage having its own cartoony mascot--a unicorn, a lobster, a cat, and so on--who will offer advice or encouragement while explaining the new twists added to the gameplay in their level. When you go to log off the game, the unicorn mascot sheds a sad tear in farewell. It's a nice touch of detail.

The game is addictive, but sometimes frustrating. Despite many 'tips' and 'suggestions', unless you can calculate fairly advanced physics in your head on the fly, once the ball is shot, it's mostly random at first. If you're good, you can 'set up' two bounces, three at the outside--and then you sit there, watching the ball bounce its way down the screen, silently wishing for telekinetic powers over pixels... Nonetheless, it is never so frustrating that it feels pointless, and there's just enough user control to tempt you to replay the level, because this time, you know just what to do. Randomization of 'power ups' and 'specials' keeps the levels from becoming stale. Moving objects, from pegs to interfering fish, also add to the challenge.

Once you've played through the 'Adventure' game, you unlock the 'Challenge' levels. There's a lot of gameplay here for a low price. This is a perfect time-waster for a slow lunch break at work, or for casual gamers of any stripe.

--Ian Harac