Peggle Deluxe

I often find myself on Speed Runs Live browsing their list of current streamers to watch games. My first priority tends to be watching Final Fantasy games. After that I'm actually more drawn to games I've never heard of instead of games I know about but don't really know. I'll get excited to watch a Megaman or Zelda run during a marathon but watching someone practicing or resetting a ton doesn't hold that much appeal for me in those games.

One game I watched a couple months ago was Peggle Deluxe. A bunch of people were running a race and it was interesting to watch them play through essentially a silly mindless single player game. There's obviously a lot of skill in the aiming and such. It reminded my of the Papa Pear Facebook game I watched my mother play a bit while I was visiting over the holidays. Aim a ball at some pegs, watch the ball bounce around using physics, lose the ball when it hits the bottom of the screen. Repeat until you hit all the relevant pegs or lose all your balls.

Anyway, I put it on my Steam wishlist and it went on sale earlier this week. $3 or something like that seemed like a fine price to pay to give it a shot!

There's a relaxing element to watching a ball bounce around and having no way to impact how it will play out after the initial aiming. It reminds me of the pachinko machines in Japan. No crazy prizes available for winning in this one though. Peggle does have some power-ups you can collect and use and there are challenge levels after you beat the base game. It can certainly be played well, and I can see why people might want to speed run it. For me it's more the sort of thing I want to play when I don't want to really focus on a game. When tired or watching LoL or something. But it is enjoyable, and I'm glad I picked it up.

And it doesn't beg me to pester my friends for free lives. If I want to play the game, I can play the game. If I want to walk away, I can walk away. So it's definitely got that over the Papa Pear thing on Facebook.