Peggle Extreme

Peggle Extreme was offered up as a free download once I activated my Steam account to play the Orange Box so I figure, what better to play over morning coffee than a free casual game.

Peggle meets Half-Life

Starting this Pop Cap Games release, I discover immediately that it's a Half-Life branded version of Peggle. Some cute unicorn informs me that Peggle land is under attack from evil critters from another dimension (head crabs and whatnot) and the only way to repel them is to, well, play Peggle.

Peggle it seems is some kind of pinball type game where you fire off balls and they bounce around except in the Peggle world, the things you hit are usually destroyed.

In the case of Peggle Extreme, the object is to take out all the orange pegs.

The gameplay is pretty simple: point a nozzle in the direction you want to ball to shoot, fire it and watch as it ricochets, hoping it takes out as many orange pegs.

You've got 10 balls and if you run out while there are still orange pegs, you lose. It's not that hard to score free balls by landing them in some kind moving...crater, I guess...thing at the bottom of the screen.

And...that's pretty much all there is to the game. Where, in this version there is one power-up. If you nail a green peg, you get some kind of fancy aiming ability where pointing your hose at a target will get you a line showing where the ricochet will go.

Portal!!

Just as I felt the game was getting repetitive, it gets broken up with some Portal branded levels.

I've already written about the awesomeness that is Portal so I was pretty happy to see levels that involve shooting balls through Portals, complete with taunts from GlaDos, the passive aggressive computer.

Conclusion

Though before I knew it, the game was over. There were only ten levels, really making this more of a demo.

Actually, I think it might be a little more sinister than a demo.

See, Pop Cap Games already has everyone's mom hooked on their products, I suspect this was an attempt in true drug-pusher fashion to get Half-Life fans to try a game they probably wouldn't normally touch and then get them hooked, thus getting them to buy the whole thing.

So will I keep playing? Really not sure, I'll need to shell out the money for the full version which I'm just not willing to do at the moment.