Simple Minds
I can barely see the computer screen to type this. I’ve gotten no sleep in the last week, it’s making me start to see things and my head hurts like hell. My wife lost her job and sits around at home all day. Our lives are falling apart but it doesn’t seem to matter, we’re waiting for the next big score. There’s a burned in image of a unicorn on our television screen. Peggle was here.
The monstrous evil in question has been out for quite a while, but only recently released on Xbox Live - which is where I snagged it from. The game is simple, as all puzzle games should ideally be, and easy to get into. You fire a ball from the top of the screen and try to make it bounce off all the orange pegs as it falls to the bottom.
And that’s really it.
You have 10 shots to clear all the orange pegs, there are bonuses for difficult shots, free balls for getting it in the bucket, special power pegs to help you along, moving pegs, a bunch of different levels, and a list of characters to choose from. So far so normal, so lets have a quick game. Good fricking luck. Playing Peggle for just five minutes turns into just five more, which becomes “I’ll stop after 9pm”, which turns to deciding if you can wait “just 5 minutes” to put down the controller and go pee. It’s menacingly addictive.
It’s extremely random, of course. There is a certain skill in predicting the angles at which two round surfaces bounce off each other while affected by gravity (ask a pool player if you can find a sober one), but once you fire off the ball you have no control over it, all you can do is watch and hold your breath as all your peg lighting dreams come true or you crash and burn, exiled from Pegopia for all time until next game - but surely that’s a vital ingredient. That the game is 50% skill and 50% chance means that while you can learn to control your shots in angle and choice, you can never really master the game. Trying to dominate the bitch of Fate and get that perfect bounce keeps you coming back for more day after day.
The other thing that keeps drawing you in (even when you are losing) is the wealth of little touches the game includes to make you feel like you are always achieving something. Hit a tough bounce shot and get a “Long Shot” bonus, get it straight in the bucket after a hit and the game commends your “Free Ball Skills”, and if you hit a lot of orange pegs on one shot it’s an “Orange Attack”. The climax of each level is punched up to the absolute maximum, blasting a mood-altering rendition of Ode to Joy as everything slows down and 
you let your superior virtual peg hitting skills speak for themselves. Even when you miss completely the game flips a coin to decide whether you get a free ball, seemingly out of pity. It’s not hard to get wrapped up enough to spend half a day on the ridiculous thing.
Of course you may choose to play secretly, since the entire game is engineered to look like a Kinder Surprise toy, presumably to forcibly emasculate players already reduced to whimpering puppies by the game itself. The “Peggle Masters” are a mix of adorable kitties, cute rabbits, hampsters, goofy-faced pumpkins and a Swedish unicorn, winning a level sets off a trail of brightly-coloured sparkles followed by a smear of rainbow informing you of your score, and the opening of the game is a serene field of pretty flowers.
So if male, prepare to perhaps spend considerable time explaining to your male counterparts that you really truly meant to switch on Halo in order to murder some alien scumholes.