Peggle Invades World of Warcraft

Drop everything, flush your life down the drain. Just give up on doing anything else, because PopCap has put Peggle into World of Warcraft.

It’s like cutting heroin with meth. Two of the most addictive substances in all of gaming, suddenly and irreversibly combined into one life-stealing, girlfriend-angering, social-life-destroying elixir. Peggle, PopCap’s psychedelic pachinko clone, and World of Warcraft, Blizzard’s titanic MMOG. Together. At the same time.

The Bejeweled add-on was bad enough, but Peggle in WoW is a whole other story. This time, the intrepid coder behind both games, Michael Fromwiller, has taken a dip into game design as well, adding some Warcraftian twists to the Peggle formula.

All the stages (which are apparently brand new) are WoW themed, backdrops taken from different locales in Azeroth. Beyond that superficial change, Peggle in WoW adds “talent points” to the Peggle formula. Just like talents in WoW itself, spending these points (which are won after beating stages), nets you gameplay-altering skills, like a multiplier for style shots, or something called “Rolling Ignition,” which gifts you with an extra green peg if you land a ball in a bucket after hitting a green peg.

And, just like in WoW, shots can “crit” for bigger scores. Crit rates can be increased with the right skills, too.

There’s also a substantial multiplayer element to the add-on as well. You can challenge friends to high score contests where you each play a round and compare scores afterward, but the highest stakes competition comes in the form of the /peggleloot command. If you’re the Master Looter in a raid or group, you type in that command and everyone with the add-on has to take a shot in the game. Whoever makes the highest score wins the loot.

I quit World of Warcraft some time ago, but I might just come back for this. Maybe. The biggest downside I can see is that there are only two characters in the game: Bjorn the stupid unicorn and Splork the alien. Where is my Spooky Ball, dammit?

You can download the add-on here, and to run it in-game, just type /peggle. You have been warned.

(WoW Insider)