A simple well designed arcade game seemingly inspired by pachinko. The gameplay is very straightforward, morish, and tightly designed making this a fun little time passer. There's a variety of characters that give your balls unique mechanics and keep things interesting throughout. It's not very long but has a variety of levels to keep you busy.

Peggle doesn't do anything revolutionary, the art and music are serviceable and have that mobile 'broadest appeal possible' vibe. The score system is engaging and ties into the mechanics nicely but I don't think anyone is 'competing' at peggle so it seems serve just as a brain reward neuron activator. It certainly introduced and popularised the concept of pachinko in the west to some degree, but it also doesn't try to weaponize the gameplay as traditional pachinko or modern games do. It just provides a solid game loop and lets you indulge in it.

Feels like the kinda game they could have bundled with windows back in the day and its genuinely refreshing to see a small self contained game that doesn't spread itself across DLC and a cosmetics shop. Exactly the kind of self contained robust design you only really see from indie now days.

I was replaying this again recently and it really struck me how well the scoring system is tied into the main gameplay. you can get extra shots by scoring highly, and your score multiplier increases as you clear orange pegs, so you engage with the score mechanics naturally as you play. do you want to prioritize orange pegs to move towards beating the level and increasing your multiplier, or improve your chances of a free ball by targeting the roaming purple peg? what about the master ability that's available currently, should it be used early in the level to help clear pegs or later on to gain extra shots from a high score? is it worth it to avoid clearing a section of normal pegs until your multiplier is higher?

the score system changes the importance of the different peg types over the course of a level, which adds a lot of decision making and increases the skill ceiling, allowing levels to be difficult without feeling unfair or too RNG heavy. naturally having a higher multiplier later on makes later shots feel more important, which helps keep the game exciting. I don't replay most games frequently but I'm always coming back to peggle because it's so consistently fun and replayable, and I think that's because it's actually really well designed! rest in peace old PopCap, they don't make em like they used to...