Peggle Nights

The real accomplishment of the night had nothing to do with debates. After the debate I was able to finish the final challenge on the new game Peggle Nights, the sequel to Peggle.


Both Peggles are a crapload of fun, and you can complete a level in five minutes, which makes it a nice break from things you're supposed to be doing, like working on your dissertation proposal. If you haven't played it, you should. It's like a surreal Pachinko-pinball hybrid where you shoot balls out of a gun and try to destroy pegs by bouncing them off one another. The Peggle Masters give you special skills, like exploding pegs or fireballs.

Peggle Nights was released just a few weeks ago. On one hand I was excited that there were 60 new levels to play, but I was a bit disappointed that there was only one new Master, a squid that lets you destroy pegs in a straight line. Laurie thought up the idea of a Master with a "sticky ball" that adheres to the other balls more than the regularly bouncy one. It might be cool to have a spider Master whose ball traces a web that destroys everything in the interior of the web. Another cool Master might be one that gives you a "topsy-turvy" skill, turning the screen upside down for one turn. These are just off the top of my head, so it's disappointing that the creative team that put together Peggle only came up with a single Master given a year of development time.

The new levels are pretty well done, though the backgrounds have more animations and moving elements than in the original, which sometimes makes things annoyingly distracting. They came up with some new challenges and reduced the number of duels, which was nice. But another feature I'd really like to see is a level editor, which lets you create your own levels and upload wallpapers to create your own background images to share with others on the internet. I think that would really open things up for open-ended game play.

Anyway, overall it's still a very good game, which would appeal to just about any demographic. Peggle Nights wasn't much of an innovation, but a decent extension of the first game.

Anyway, here are my trophies: