PopCap Denies Peggle DS Rumors
"We have ambitious plans for many of our titles including Peggle, and are eager to bring its peg-popping pleasures to as many appropriate platforms and devices as possible," said PopCap video game platform VP Greg Canessa. "But Nintendo has not approved this product, we have not signed a developer to port Peggle to DS, and we have not green lighted this project."
Earlier this year, PopCap confirmed than an Xbox Live Arcade edition of Peggle was tentatively slated to arrive in Q2 2008. A sequel, dubbed Peggle Nights, is also known to be in the works.
Previously released on PC, Mac, and the iPod, the Pachinko-like offerings of Peggle have won over many a cold-hearted gamer despite its use of unicorns, rainbows, and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." A mature Half-Life themed version, dubbed Peggle Extreme, is included with PC copies of Valve's The Orange Box and the PC demo of Portal.
"There are always rumors flying around regarding casual games and where they're headed, and in this case the rumor mill seems to have gone into overdrive," Canessa continued. "This is a perfect example of why our company policy is to not comment on future plans until they're finalized."
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I realise Shacknews trades heavily in videogame news but seriously, sometimes it is better to dream. This is crushing :(
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Last year I was speaking with someone from the Casual Games Association who repeated their mantra to me: "We are all casual gamers." It's seriously true. How I ever managed to ignore Peggle for months because of the casual game label is shameful to me -- it's an amazingly addictive game.
Bejeweled still sucks, though. :D
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You can find Popcap's framework and related developer stuff here: http://developer.popcap.com/forums/pop_index.php You'll need to register, though it's free. The only officially supported platform is Windows, but other developers have ported to OSX (and I think that port runs on Linux too).
Playfirst (they're the ones behind Diner Dash) has their developer stuff at https://developer.playfirst.com/ and the framework officially runs on Windows and OSX
Popcap's support for their framework is pretty minimal. It's more like "here's this cool stuff we use for our games, here, you use it too if you want, whatever". Playfirst actually have a developer program for serious developers working with them to publish games too, so the support is much better there, though community support is probably better for Popcap, judging from forum activity. Functionally, the two frameworks are roughly equivalent, though I'd give Playfirst the edge.
I'm almost positive you can use both frameworks with the free version of Visual C++ that Microsoft distributes.
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