The Wall Street Journal-20080112-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Picks -- Online- Games- Peggle brings an amusing twist to the iPod
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Picks -- Online: Games; Peggle brings an amusing twist to the iPod
FOR IPOD OWNERS, whipping through a music library with a thumb on the click wheel is second nature. Using that wheel to blast bricks, play poker or pilot Ms. Pac-Man is less familiar. Hoping to change that is the maker of a new videogame that turns an iPod screen into a futuristic Pachinko machine.
In Peggle, players use the click wheel to aim a turret at the top of the screen, then fire a silvery ball down into an array of glowing pegs and blocks. Eliminating certain colors with angled shots and ricochets is the goal, but because gravity -- or Peggle's simulation of it -- does most of the work, the action is effortless, hypnotic and progressively strategic. Advanced stages feature multiple balls, pinball flippers and complicated mosaics of pegs.
Peggle comes from PopCap, a maker of easy-to-play "casual games," such as Bejeweled. According to the company, a free trial version of Peggle for computers has been downloaded about 13 million times since it was released last spring (about 2% of downloaders went on to pay $20 for the full game -- a healthy conversion rate for a casual game). The iPod version, which Apple plans to promote on its iTunes home page in the coming weeks, sells for about $5.
In contrast to the thousands of songs, movies and TV shows for sale on iTunes, only about 20 game titles are available. In part that's because Apple has invited few game makers to convert titles into the iPod system. Also, the click wheel isn't conducive to many of the games played with a computer mouse or keyboard. And though Peggle's design nullifies that problem, players still face a more intractable issue: battery drain.
