You know that feeling you get when you’ve been inside your dimly lit apartment all day watching TV or idly futzing around on your laptop, that somewhat awful feeling you get that’s kind of a low-grade headache + neck soreness + a general inability to breathe as well as you’d like (sometimes known, somewhat obtusely, as cabin fever): Peggle is that feeling, in computer/video game form. The point of Peggle is, on its face, very simple: one is presented with a board filled with colored ‘pegs’ (hence the name), some of which are orange. You, the player, are given ten silver pinball-looking balls and are given the task of eliminating (by shooting them with said pinballs) all of the orange pegs. There’s a catch: you can’t do anything after you shoot your little silver pinball thing at the orange pegs, anything at all, and so much of one’s time spent ‘playing’ Peggle consists of watching a little silver ball bounce off of variously colored pegs. But oh, somehow, oh what fun it is. There are special powers. There are anthropomorphic animal Peggle Masters who guide you along an ‘adventure’. And whenever you clear a board, Ode to Joy blasts out triumphantly. Yet, as discussed above, one tends to feel logey at best after only playing Peggle for even a few minutes. Because of this – the push & pull between Peggle being a boring game wherein the player does little and Peggle being an exclamatory game filled with cartoon buddies and shiny objects – I like to think of it as America’s game, the game we modern Americans deserve and choose (apparently in droves: 50 million and counting!) to play. So what if we haven’t worked all that hard to earn an Ode to Joy + rainbow ending? We fucking deserve it.
