Blog de Dyer

Some time ago, I was talking with Dan Amrich from Official Xbox Magazine. It was a general AIM conversation that somehow strayed towards Peggle. At the time, I had no interest in Peggle. I’d played the demo and was fascinated by it, but not as a game. I made a witty comment to Dan to the effect of “it’s a sandwich making simulator. I click the mouse and then I leave the room. When I get back from said sandwich making I have points.” He gave me many question marks and exclamation points after an “are you fucking crazy”-esque question.

Yeah, dude. I am wrong, too.

I shrugged off Peggle as a game because I found that there was no skill in Plinko-With-Unicorns, but fast-forward six months and I’ve purchased the iPod version of the game, and have sunk probably 10 hours of my life in to it. There is a certain skill, I realized, because I fail a lot. It’s a physics simulator, like many other tech-demo-y look-what-I-can-do games out there, and if you don’t account for momentum, rebounds and arcs you’re screwed.

I think the word for this is “erratum”, but that sounds too pretentious to say, so I’ll say this: I messed up, Mr. Amrich. Peggle is fucking sweet.

I had to pause Grand Theft Auto IV to write about this right now. As is the usual in GTA, I was running around jacking cars, doing missions, and tooling around by beating the crap out of harmless civilians. I was punching randoms in hopes of getting my “Finish Him” Achievement (10 counter attacks in four minutes) which I eventually did nab.

Afterwards, for whatever reason, I stabbed a guy. I don’t know why, but I did. I had this though about GTA leading up to its release that it would be more difficult for me to kill innocents because they looked and acted real, but up until this point I didn’t ever think about it. I’d seen people hold papers over their head when it rains, and I’ve seen women carrying groceries — very normal stuff. This wasn’t “human” though, so when I accidentally ran them over when in hot pursuit I didn’t really care.

Back to the guy I stabbed, he was on his phone, minding his own business. I ran up to him, and stuck my knife in his back, and something unexpected happened. He didn’t turn around and try to punch me while yelling “Fuck you, man!” or something else that the idiotic AI pedestrians would have in previous iterations. He didn’t whip out a gun. He didn’t even try to fight back.

He fell to the ground and began to sob.

It took a minute for that to sink in. I stabbed him. He fell, started to sob, and tried to run away. He started to yell for help as he did, and I felt bad. I stabbed him a few times before that sank in, and I had this feeling of pity and regret. I didn’t know whether to let him go, or put him out of his misery.

I wanted to help this poor guy that I had no reason to stab, but I did.

Well played, Rockstar.