Peggle Fever

Hey, folks. Bit frazzled here today. I’ve got computer problems.

Now, our computers are a bit different from yours. Whereas your computers move “electrons” around in “logical patterns,” ours operate on much more awesome magical principles. So while you guys keep making your computers smaller and smaller, so small you can carry ‘em around with you and slop alfredo sauce on them without thinking, we go the other way; our computers just keep getting bigger!

Why, just last month I had to knock a wall down to add enough RAM for a Doors Vista upgrade. Now THAT’S a computer! And let me tell you, I’m in no danger of misplacing it or dropping it down the stairs!

Anyway, such remarkable efficiency sometimes comes with a cost. It seems a family of spider monkeys has taken up residence somewhere in my registry. Normally I wouldn’t mind, I’d just work around it, but today my browser is clogged with monkey waste and I can’t get anything done.

Nope, I had to bite the bit and call in a team of computer gremlins. They charge 50 coins an hour and they’ve been at it all morning. No use watching them work, either (they say it makes them “fungly”), so I trotted on over to Hu’s office, sent him for coffee and logged on under my account so I could tap up this blog post.

Now that’s done, I still have to head down to the workshop and take a look at the new Peggle boards we’re putting together. A headmaster’s work is never done, only postponed!

Busy day here at the Institute, folks. We’re adding a whole new wing to expand our remote teaching facilities and ball storage. Just in time, too; I’ve been tripping over extra balls all week (what with the whole Gamestop “Free Peggle Ball with Dual Shot pre-order” deal going now).

But it’s the remote teaching I’m really excited about. We’ve seen a huge influx of human students here at the Institute over the last year and it’s been a struggle to accommodate everyone. Transmitting Peggle lessons across the Einstein-Pooper magical sub-quantum bridge to the human universe may seem like a simple operation to you, but it requires a lot of heavy equipment on our end. We’ve been keeping all the gear in my office up to this point, so it’ll be nice to be able to get a cup of coffee without having to climb out the window.

I’m blogging from my uPhone as the contractors install the new transmitter, and let me tell you, it’s a sight! Or rather, it would be if it wasn’t invisible. According to Splork it’s a huge glob of eighty-foot purple candy-canes rotating in six and a half different directions backwards in time. I’ll take his word for it. Hey, I just pay the bills around here.

Anyway, this new setup will allow us to deliver four septillion simultaneous lessons to your Earth every month, which is up three septillion from before and should easily last us until the end of the semester. If you like, grab a copy of Peggle and help us test it out!

Yeesh! What a day!

It started off as usual – got out of magic bed, had a bowl of magic oats, took a quick magic shower and headed over to the magic gym for some quick 3-point shots (not magic, just skill).

Everything’s cool until I trot down to the loading dock to take delivery of this month’s shipment of rainbows only to discover, hey, all the colors are backwards!

I ask the delivery porcupine what’s the deal and he just shrugs and tells me to call head office. Of course head office weaves me this magical web of fairy crap about how they followed our specifications and I’m like, hey, this is the same order we’ve been making for the last three years and unless I’m calling you guys up in the middle of the night to adjust our rainbow specs while I’m asleep, nothing’s changed!

Bottom line, they can’t fill the replacement order until next Friday at the earliest. Fantastic. We’re already down to our last half-pallet of rainbows and I’m staring a full week of rainbowless Extreme Fevers dead in the face.

Well, you know what they say: when the going gets tough, the quick-thinking and resourceful unicorns get going. I cancelled all the classes, assembled the Masters in the warehouse, handed them slide rules and prisms and told them to get to work.

Believe me, they weren’t happy. Warren started whining hardcore, Jimmy actually cried and Cinderbottom flatly refused, saying it was beneath his station as an accredited Peggle Master and Lord of the Order of the Flame blah blah blah. Finally I had to pull out a Peggle board and show everybody just what Extreme Fever without a rainbow looks like.

Nobody said anything. They just picked up their gear (well, the ones with hands did, anyway) and got to work. That’s why they’re the best team in the business. Together we inverted eight hundred pounds of rainbows in just seven hours. I don’t know if you know how much a rainbow weighs, but trust me, eight hundred pounds is a LOT of rainbows.

It was a lot of work we were forced to do by the failure of our incompetent suppliers, but when it was finally over and we threw the last corrected rainbow down the transduction chute, I’ll tell you, it felt great. I made a keg of magic elixir appear in a puff of smoke and we all toasted our efforts except for Jimmy, who’s still two gopher-months shy of gopher-legal. I suppose it all turned out okay but Moon, we sure don’t need too many days like that again!

Hi! I’m Bjorn Unicorn, founder and headmaster of the Peggle Institute! Here at the Institute, we like to turn students into masters – but I suspect you already know that.

(If you don’t, check out Peggle or Peggle Nights at PopCap Games. That should bring you up to speed!)

Our human partners at PopCap have a whole bagful of Pegglestuff coming up, so they asked me to put together a little “weblog” to keep folks abreast of current and future Peggle goings-on. How could I refuse? I couldn’t. It’s in our distribution contract.

What can you expect here at the Bjorn Blog? Tasty tidbits about human Peggle products, for one. The folks at PopCap have Peggle coming at you from every imaginable angle in the next couple of months and you’ll hear about ‘em here first. The list they handed me starts with “Peggle Dual Shot for the Nintendo DS, PopCap Arcade Vol. 2 for the XBox 360, Peggle Nights retail…” and then goes on for two more pages of single-spaced squiggles I can’t make out but seems like a lot. Does that one say “contest”? C…O…N… that’s gotta be a “t”… yep, I’m pretty sure that says “contest.”

But the Bjorn Blog isn’t going to be just about new Peggle products coming live to the human world via PopCap Games. There’s a whole world of excitements going on at the Peggle Institute too, and since we’re not making a TV series, it’s all going on this blog. Insights into the Masters, day-to-day operations of the universe’s leading Peggle establishment, guest web-loggers and personal behind-the-scenes anecdotes will abound. You’ll be treated to the dark underbelly and shiny overback of the Peggle world, details and stories you simply won’t hear anywhere else. And that’s a promise, sworn on my horn which—I’m sure I don’t have to tell you—is loaded with magic.

So welcome aboard! Click on the links and various Internet page thingies, amuse yourself, tell your friends, come back semiweekly and above all, have fun!