Thursday 31 January, 2008
Contrary to what a lot of people's experience with this game must be, I've only just recently played this for the first time. I do, however, know a little bit about it from reading an article about the design and development of Peggle. I think it might have been in Edge.
Anyways, Peggle Extreme comes bundled with the Orange Box, and I've been slowly making my way through each of the games that are a part of that. (witness my GameLogs for HL2, HL2 Ep1 and HL2 Ep2). Peggle Extreme is, however, the strangest of the lot. Essentially, the folks at Valve love Peggle and conviced the folks at Popcap to create a Valve flavoured version of the game (using artwork from Half-Life 2, Portal, and Team Fortress) they could bundle as a demo.
I find the whole thing quite an interesting concept. There are games with advertising and there are games that are for advertising, however it's pretty rare (I can't think of any examples at the moment, but surely there must be some) for a game to brand itself with another game in order to promote itself. Does that make any sense?
Peggle Extreme is like Chevrolet hoping to boost sales of its cars by letting potential buyers test drive a car plastered with Coca Cola stickers...and Coca Cola isn't getting anything out of the deal. (well, maybe they got paid?). If you think about it, Peggle Extreme isn't promoting Valve's games, because it came bundled with all of them! (now I'm curious to know if you can get Peggle Extreme without having to buy Orange Box...hmmm).
Anyways, it's an interesting experiment and it's been interesting to play so far. More later!
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