So I Tried... Peggle Extreme

Each edition of So I Tried… I will try a game that I have never played before. Will I find something new to love? Will I find something new to despise? I'll take a full half hour, no matter how bad it gets or how badly I do, to see if this is the game for me. This time, I played Peggle Extreme.

Well, technically, we played Peggle Extreme. Recently, I and a few others in the GrinCast streamed ourselves Peggleing it out for the very first time.

What I Thought It Was

Peggle! I very much thought it would be Peggle. Only… extreme-er.

I admit, I have partaken in a Peggle game many moons ago when I was but a small child. I remember puzzle after puzzle of shooting a ball into glowing pegs for points. I remember that some of the pegs glow different colours than the others and that this is important somehow. I also remember being absolutely terrible at racking up large point totals and, as such, being unable to clear all of the levels. I recall enjoying it well enough up to that point; however, since this is Peggle Extreme, I am fully prepared for a version of Peggle that is even harder than I remember. Well, not prepared to do well, mind you, but prepared to be frustrated.

What It Actually Is

Peggle Extreme is a small collection of 10 free pachinko-based puzzles where you must hit every randomly selected orange peg on the board to win, though you only have 10 balls with which to play per level, so you have to carefully line up shots so that they’ll ricochet off and hit other pegs. There’s also a hole at the bottom of the screen moving side to side and landing a ball in there will net you an extra ball!

Additionally, Peggle Extreme’s 10 levels are themed on the games collected in Valve’s The Orange Box: Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal, as well as Half-Life 2: Episode One and Episode Two. I’ll admit that I haven’t really played much of Half-Life in general, so I can’t really speak to the accuracy there, but it seems most of that theming came in from those titles’ music playing in the background and there being art from those games behind the puzzles. The Portal-inspired levels also featured portals, which were fun to work with, though I was somewhat confused by how they only went one way.

As for whether or not Peggle Extreme was harder than my half-remembered recollections of Peggles past… Not really? I mean, of the four of us on the stream, I definitely struggled the most — several of the others made it to the five extra challenge puzzles or the Duel Mode while I was still working through the base 10 levels — but I actually managed to beat the game in my short time with it. As such, either it’s easier than the Peggle from my memories or I’ve gotten better at videogames since I was a little girl. And who ever heard of people getting better at videogames?

Will I Keep Playing?

The short answer is no — I already beat the game, after all. Peggle Extreme is fun enough as a way to waste around half an hour, but there’s not much there after you’ve beaten the 10 levels and the five extra challenges. My confidence in my Peggle abilities has gone up, so I might try more games in the series, but I have no desire to continue with this one specifically.