I love PopCap Games
Chuzzle
and Peggle.
. When you arrive on the home page, click “New Deals Everyday, Click Here” to see all the Winter Funderland deals.

Today’s deal is the first FREE “level pack” for Peggle Nights. Available exclusively at Popcap.com, the Peggle Nights “Holiday 2008″ level pack features five all-new levels, with holiday themes or themes related to other PopCap titles – or in some cases, both. The new levels can be played in the Quick Play or Duel modes of Peggle Nights, and there are also ten new challenges in Challenge Mode based on the new levels. Additional level packs will be forthcoming in 2009 and beyond.

It’s a good thing I keep an open mind when it comes to playing and reviewing games, or else I might’ve never met Peggle. How appropriate that its follow gets the name Peggle Nights. The original kept hubby and me up many nights past our bedtime. I’m not a big fan of arcade play mainly because I don’t like the pressure of move, move, move!

A little sidebar here. While growing up, my parents had a classic pachinko machine (classic uses a lever to make the ball pop not electronics like today’s pachinko machines). While living in Washington, DC, hubby and I took a weekend trip to Atlantic City in January of 1993. We watched the Dallas Cowboys whip the San Francisco 49ers then went out on the boardwalk.

There, we discovered a store selling pachinkos! I had always wanted another one because my parents’ pachinko machine died years before and never worked well. Only, these were electronic and we bought one. Still have it, but poor thing sits in a corner drowning in dust. You see, when we moved back to Texas, we had an 18-month old followed by two more kids. No parent wants pachinko marbles all over the house or G-d forbid, a kid swallow one.

We should sharpen up the machine again now that the baby is five. It needs a stand or cabinet rather than sit on the floor. So where am I going with this story? Peggle is pachinko with brighter colors, cooler music, and rockin’ slow motion. Besides, the background changes every time. Pachinko only has one background and so many special effects.

Peggle Nights brings all new scenes with the same masters. Fans won’t see any new features or upgrades, but more like a big change of scenery. Adventure mode returns with 60 levels that take more work to beat. Each of the 11 masters tells you its dream — thus, “night”, lends you its bonus power, and sticks with you for five levels. The final five levels let you select the master you want to use.

Pumpkin dreams of being a painter, so the background reflects his painting. One of the funnier backgrounds — cliché, but funny — shows the famous The Scream painting with the pumpkin’s face replacing the screamer’s face.

All the masters return with their famous powers that help us whenever we hit a green peg. The lobster’s claws come out working like flippers in a pinball machine, rabbit’s magic hat helps hit more pegs, and King Tut’s pyramid expands the bucket to improve your chances of catching the ball.

The goal for every level is to clear all the orange pegs. Blue pegs dominate the screen to act as barriers, green turns on the power up, and purple triples the score. Though 60 levels sounds like a lot for most games, it still doesn’t take me more than a day to complete adventure mode.

New in Peggle Nights is the introduction of Ace Score. Every level has an ace score where you can win a red ribbon whenever you beat the score. So after you finish adventure mode, you can replay any in level Quick Play mode so you can win every Ace ribbon. Clear all the pegs for a bonus blue ribbon.

Duel mode lets you compete with other players or against the computer. Challenge mode contains challenging peggle games where may have fewer balls.

Another wonderful feature is colorblind mode, which makes the graphics more efficient to those with colorblindness.

Perfect your shots to win points and recognition for style shots. The Super Long Shot, worth 5000 points (10,000 in Duel mode), requires hitting a non-blue peg, traveling two-thirds the width of the screen to hit another non-blue peg. Off the Wall, valued at 25,000 points, involves bouncing the ball of the wall and traveling one-fifths the width of the screen to hit a non-blue peg.

Masters also have specific style shots. The lobster awards Flipper Maniac and 25,000 points whenever bouncing the ball off a flipper and hitting at least one peg four times. Zap 12 one more pegs with Electrobolt for a Shock It to Me reward and 25,000 points.

I put off this review for as long as I could. After all, it was my excuse for playing Peggle Nights instead of handing it over to hubby so he could play. Now, I’ll have to share. It’s still a delight to hear Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and watch the fireworks when I win. It certainly lessens the pain I’ve been in for over a week with sciatica. Count on Peggle Nights to chase away the blues or ease the pain and even make you smile.

I’m trying with all my might to resist saying this, but my willpower went on vacation today. Hyperballoid 2: Time Rider ain’t your daddy’s (or mommy’s for that matter as I played video games as a kid) breakout game. How we’ve come a long way from Breakout and other bland brick breaking games.

Peggle first convinced me breakout games worth playing do exist even for those tired of such games (me included and that goes for arcade, too). Hyperballoid 2 grips from the start with its firecracking special effects, superb graphics, and variety of backgrounds — known as worlds — including ancient, hitech, original, and planets.

When you change worlds, you start a new game. Return to any world and you pick up from where you left off before. Not only does the background in the world represent that world’s theme, but also the arrangement of the bricks. In hitech, the game treats me a UFO flying in and out of the screen.

With 280 different kinds of bricks, it’ll be tough to get bored. There are standard rectangle bricks, rectangle bricks with a circle inside, stone bricks, bricks that detonate when hit. They also disappear and reappear, float, move back and forth, act as barriers.

Elements come flying down like a bridal bouquet for the catching for bonuses. Bonuses expand your paddle, give you multiple balls, shoot flames, shoot cannons. These bonuses have three different colors: green, yellow, red. Just like stoplights, green is good. Red is bad. Yellow — slowing down the ball’s movement, for one — is so so. Slowing down the ball gives you time to move your paddle, but it also makes you impatient waiting for it to do its thing.

The physics of the game work beautifully. Be prepared for balls defying physics as bonuses can turn them into crazy balls doing loopty-loops and other unpredictable moves.

For those who love to design and create, you can edit any of the levels to change them up and create your own to share. But this doesn’t appeal to me — it’s not easy to use and I don’t want to mess up the original settings. The toggles, options, buttons have no labels, so move the mouse pointer over each item to see its tooltip to find out what the item does. Too time consuming.

The game’s mode (easy, normal, hard, expert) is adjustable, but the pop up window that appears at the start for selecting the mode has typos, so it doesn’t make sense. It also takes effort to figure out how to switch modes because this doesn’t appear in the options. Instead, you return to the main menu and click “Other Campaigns.” Here you can download new campaigns like Chinese Zodiac and each new campaign comes with a five star rating system as voted by the community.

Hyperballoid 2 lasts for a long time with over 200 levels to beat. It’s also easy to pick up the game when you haven’t played it for a long time. Hyperballoid 2 is like playing a variety of solitaire games where the rules never change. Superb visuals, diversity of everything, and smashing audio effects (loud, too… had to turn down the settings… way down) will take players out of this world giving them a break from their daily lives for a little while.

Peggle clone Spring Up! takes on a gardening twist. This Breakout-style game starts with the ball at the top of the screen where players point and shoot in hopes of hitting as many like-colored pegs and bricks. That’s where the similarity to Peggle ends. Unless Spring Up! is for a child, stick with the stellar Peggle.

Young kids will appreciate Spring Up! because you can’t lose the game — it has no rules, minimums, or goals to frustrate the kids. They can just keep shooting the ball until all the pegs and bricks fall down. The main goal is to clear the pegs and bricks, but they must be hit by a ball of the same color to fall down. Catch the falling items for added points. Four available power ups also fall for the catching. One makes the paddle wider, another ups the score multiplier, the third adds points, and the fourth and only negative power up shrinks the paddle.

As you rack up points in adventure mode, use the money to buy junk for the garden. The garden contains $ all over, which cost $5000. Click a $ and that particular $ price goes up to $20,000 while the others remain at $5000 until clicked. The garden holds 50 items and it’s not really customizeable. All you can do is click which item you want next. That’s all. No moving stuff around, changing colors, or anything.

Spring Up! has a quirk — not sure if it’s a bug or a work-around. Sometimes falling objects don’t make it to the bottom and just sit there. I mean after all, if a volleyball can get caught on a gym’s ceiling (which it did at a tournament I watched last week), physics can explain why an object gets stuck. When the object stops moving and all loose objects fall, the stuck object disappears and another ball awaits shooting. No harm, no foul.

Except for the locations and number of pegs and objects, the scenes don’t change much. Fans do show up to blow falling objects to make them harder to catch for bonus points. The game could use more obstacles like the fans to keep players guessing.

The game offers no challenge. Little variety. Unexciting graphics. But it could be a great game for young children people who hate losing, or those who need a simple game with that won’t aggravate.