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What’s the greatest-ever puzzle game? I bid you to consider for a moment what the greatest electronic puzzle game is. Ok, you’re right, it’s Tetris. But if the mighty Russian block-annihilating masterpiece had a puzzle-cousin in second place then the decision might not be so clear-cut. The last couple of decades have been crammed with decent puzzle games of all kinds. Few of them, however, are as fine as the one I want to recommend this week. If there was to be a second-greatest puzzle game of all time, then it might actually be Peggle, by PopCap Games. Peggle is a videogame variant of both pinball and the Japanese pinball-like game pachinko. The Peggle screen is filled with coloured pegs onto which you must bounce a metal sphere. This sphere can be fired at any angle from the top of the screen. When the ball falls off the bottom of the screen you move onto the next shot, the aim being to get as many bounces off the pegs as possible, clearing the screen of orange pegs to win. Once hit, the pegs disappear, making the shots harder and harder as the game goes on. This basic pegs/ball mechanic is augmented by a bunch of power-ups that do odd things to your ball, or allow you to have interesting additional abilities for a couple of turns.  Sounds ludicrously simple? It is: but don't underestimate just how compulsive Peggle can be. Those who’ve started playing are often unable to stop, even if they didn’t like the look of the game in the first instance. Like most great games, Peggle is what clever folk call computationally irreducible, which means no amount of description or observation can articulate just how satisfying this game is to play. I don’t know why this phenomenon seems so pronounced with Peggle, but it must be something to do with its near-perfect production and perfect difficulty curve. Peggle, I would argue, is a genuine contender.
Jim Rossignol
Peggle is out now on PC.
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