Let’s roll back the clock about a year, to June 19th of last year.  At that time, I’d just finished playing “Peggle Extreme”, a game featuring unicorns, just after an article about Secret of the Magic Crystals, another game featuring unicorns, and I wanted to make it clear, at the time, that I did NOT have a Unicorn Problem.

Of late, of course, that’s an argument that holds less water.

Let’s move on, shall we?

PopCap has made a lot of people very rich by making games that are shiny, happy, and addictive as all hell, and I am sure that I sacrifice any vestiges of gamer cred I have ever had by admitting that I have a low resistance to the ones I’ve tried so far.  When I played through Peggle Extreme last year, for example, I burned through the 10 levels in about a half hour, then went back and played them a second time, then started working on various challenges before I managed to break myself away, and I lost two days to Plants Vs Zombies.

It was, therefore, probably not a good thing last night when I realized that a) I had a half hour before bedtime with nothing in particular to do and b) had a copy of Peggle Deluxe already installed on my Macbook Pro.

90 minutes later, I staggered to bed.

I was not at my best when I work up at 6 the next morning, and I considered sleeping in for an hour but rejected the concept in favor of playing more Peggle up until basically the last possible moment I could leave for work and still get in roughly on time.

I really have made some very poor life choices, from time to time.

Anyway, I ought to have been a mess at work but I actually arrived in quite a chipper mood and managed to maintain that throughout the day.

Then I came home and played more Peggle.

I am happy to report that I have now finished the – can we really call it a story mode? – story mode and have a logical break point where I can stop playing Peggle and get on with other things in life, as soon as the hallucinations of exploding blue and orange pegs stop.

There are a lot worse ways to follow up a weekend spent playing Amnesia.