Peggle Positions

Peggle rocks.

That could be my whole blog, Peggle rocks. I love the fact that it’s a great pick up and play title, if you’ve got a few minutes to kill. Admittedly, if those few minutes to kill were before an important appointment, you would then be late because, you know, you’d still be playing Peggle but the theory is there. You can just pick up and play when you want.

As I have mentioned before, my girlfriend is not particularly into games, but she will potter around a few arcade titles – she ploughed through and finished Jewel Quest (as in completely finished it) and still holds that over me in a smug-faced way.

The other day, she discovered Peggle. I was happily playing away, trying to clear the stages and she asked what I was playing. She asked if we could play it together. I answered in the affirmative and we set up to play a duel or two. We never played the duels. Somehow, the single player game had sucked Carole in. I lost her for many hours that night.

A few nights later, she spotted that the Xbox was not in use and using her feminine charms persuaded me to let her play Peggle. Off she went, while I was pottering away on the PC. A short while into the evening there was a cry from downstairs.

“Jake, come here, I don’t understand what this is?”

Wondering what was wrong, and hoping that nothing had died, or was aflame, I headed downstairs to find Carole flicking through the leaderboards.

“What’s this mean?” she asks.
I look at the screen, take in the leaderboard and say “You’re 22,246 in the world on that level.”
“Oh right,” she says, flicking through the screens. “What about this one though?”
I look again. I do a comedy double take. “That, erm, means you’re 15th in the world on that level.”
“Oh,” she says.

As I have mentioned before, Carole is quite competitive when it comes to things like this. We’ve had a look through the level scores on Peggle and she’s beating most people on my friends list at most of the levels.

I know there’s not a massive amount of skill involved in Peggle, as a lot relies on the bounces you get that are out of your control but it’s still humbling for a non-gamer to come along, play a game for a few hours and be within spitting distance of being the jammiest person on the planet for one level.

And she had the cheek to say I was a geek when I was ranked 448th on something.