GOTW 09/03/09 – PEGS IN SPACE/PEGGLE
April 14, 2009
This was the week before I moved into Wandsworth with Chris so I was quite busy and actually went home to pack and generally ‘sort stuff’, every night. By the Friday I realised that I haven’t played any games at all that week. Aware that I had a fan-base to please a had a quick look around for a casual game to pick up for half an hour to give away the easiest GotW title so far. I remembered that there was a Peggle clone available for the iPhone as I’d recently read that it was forced to change it’s name from ‘Peggie’ to ‘Pegs in Space’ by Popcap, creators of the original. Fools, inadvertently advertised their competitors in doing so.
I downloaded Pegs in Space and it’s a good game for a mobile – so incredible casual that you would not mind for a second being interrupted and have to abandon a game but still, on some primal level, a very satisfying time-sink for those moments between moments (aka the bog). It would be completely remiss of me to review ‘Pegs in Space’ as a separate entity to Peggle. Peggle deserves the credit. What ‘Pegs in Space’ brings to the table is that it is on a mobile device. Oh, and also there’s a tilt peg that uses the accelerometer. Its greatest strength is that it’s an utterly shameless clone so it’s a carbon copy (minus the surreal unicorn themes) of the bafflingly addictive original – if you had told me it was by Popcap I’d have believed you. Not that there’s a lot to get wrong with Peggle.
Peggle, see’s you bouncing marbles at pegs to make them vanish in an effort to clear the board. Carefully line up the trajectory to hit as many of the right pegs in one go to maximise your multiplier and your chances of clearing the board before running out of balls. That’s pretty much it. There are some power-up pegs as well but you don’t need me to go into detail. It’s not the sort of game you can sell – you just have it placed in front of you and then an afternoon is gone.
There’s a movement in the Gamerverse that says this kind of casual time-sink game is not a ‘proper’ game. As if all games must have narrative, or humanoid characters with guns otherwise they are not ‘serious’. That abstract gaming is for women or people who don’t take their games seriously. Or worse yet – that games are art – but only when they are replicating other forms of art and that “casual” games are the mere entertainment. I’d like to flip that notion back at this segment of the gaming fraternity – I put it to you that casual games like this are games in their purest form unfiltered, unprocessed play; the joy of a motion that you had an autonomous role in setting off or keeping going. That being said, neither Pegs in Space, nor Peggle warrant a score as high as any of the other GotWs so far. You are not a gamer unless you’ve obsessively played an abstract, one/two input only game. Helicopter is my favourite. But I didn’t play Helicopter that week. I played ‘Pegs in Spaaace’!
Demo for Peggle is Available Here
