OpenPeggle
It took my phone falling out of my pocket and into a canal in order to convince myself to buy a shiny new iPhone 4S. I loved it. I loved messing with Siri, I loved the notification center, and most of all, my favorite game from the PC was available on the minute screen - Peggle. What a fantastic game. I loved how easy it was to play, I was fascinated with the little characters who help you out on your way, I loved the abilities the green pegs gave you...it's a great game. Even after all of this...I'm still a huge fan.
The day after the incident, one of my coworkers was showing off his jail broken phone and the cool things she was able to do with it, like theming the damned thing. I always thought the iOS default style was pretty lame, so I decided to jailbreak my shiny new toy. The process was successful, and I was able to customize it and do whatever I want to it. I added a Star Trek theme because I'm a huge nerd, and that's what we as nerds liked to do.
It came at a price though - the App Store did not work for me anymore. Whenever I opened that app, it revealed nothing but a white window. I've looked at the internet on how to fix this, tried all the fixes, and I still wasn't able to use the App Store. Fortunately, most jailbreaks these days gave you an alternate store, known as Cydia. I was able to find equivalent software on the Cydia store, no problem.
One issue was Peggle. I missed my dear Peggle. I wasn't able the download the real thing - but after some searching around, I was able to find a one star app called "OpenPeggle". Searching for it didn't help - it looked like the author didn't give it any keywords to search by. I had to dig through the games category, where there were over a thousand entries. Most of the reviews were "Got to a point where there were no pegs! What do I do?" and "wtf?". Unfortunately, looks like it was only option if I wanted my Peggle fix. The screenshots looked normal enough, although a bit bland. One of the screenshots was a picture of a large Malamute. I assumed that this was a joke by the creator.
The icon was simply a penguin and a peg. The name of the app was "Peggle". I pressed the icon. The first splash screen told me that it was designed by Bjorn Smith. The title screen had a distinct ice theme with penguins, which I assumed would act as the mentors of the real game.
There were only two options: play and settings. Pressing settings crashed the game. Pressing play brought you to the first level. Unlike the real game, this one had no side bar and was very sparse. Just the little shooter and some pegs. I noticed there were no green pegs, only the yellow and orange pegs. There was also no music or colorful background images, which increased the game's creepy vibe. There were no sound effects either. The background was just an empty white void.
The physics of the game seemed off, and there was no dial to move the shooter. Just press on the screen, and the shooter does it's best to shoot the ball wherever you touched on the screen. After eliminating all the orange pegs, OpenPeggle doesn't move to Fever Mode, which was your chance to score an insane amount of points, just moves you to the next silent level.
After a while, I moved to rooms without pegs, and I noticed that there was nothing I could do...until I noticed that I was able to shoot the ball off screen on this level. A little weird, and not really fun, I tried this for a while until I got bored. Interestingly, despite that it was supposedly "Open Source", I wasn't able to find the source code for the game at all. Nor anything about the game's creator. He had a MySpace account for a while, but it hasn't been active in about four years. He didn't have a Facebook account.
One night, I was bored, and decided to see if I could pass the level with off screen pegs.. Whether by luck (or perhaps, being unlucky), I was able to find them all. After one pegless room, you went into another one. Then another one, and this time, there was a background - it was the dog of the picture. The large stately malamute.. And then finally one last one, which had one peg directly to the left off screen of the shooter. There was a background for this one too - the dog looked like it was in fear. It's rare to see that kind of dog in that kind of position. I looked at the clock, I was playing this game for about 4 hours at this point, and started to get sleeping. For some reason, I was compelled to go on.
After this last one-peg room, I got into something interesting. It looked like the Pac-Man kill screen, but red tinged. There was a dark red background, and the foreground looked like random letters and red-tinted pegs. But, I was still able to shoot the ball off the pegs. The way to the bottom was blocked by pegs, but when the ball fell off the bottom of the pegs, I screamed and threw my phone away from me. The background was a gruesome image of a body splayed out, cut and skinned. I assumed it was the dog from the previous level. What kind of bastard does that type of thing? Shutting down the game was hard to do - I assumed the game locked up, forcing me to look at this awful sight. Eventually, I performed a hard reset and after getting to the home screen, uninstalled the game. Unfortunately, it wouldn't uninstall itself. Sighing, I left it there, hoping to never click on it.
After a while, I noticed the phone was acting weird. Music would have random moments where it'd sound like I was playing dubstep - slow, distorted and murky. Podcasts would have the same effect, as well as the occasional freak speedup, where the speaker would start talking in a million miles an hour.
Phone calls would simply not work - I'd press dial, but it goes back to the recent call list.
Buying new apps didn't work either - sometimes they'll install correctly, sometimes they instantly vanish after I bought them.
There was one incident in which my niece grabbed my phone so that she can play games. She clicked on OpenPeggle and started crying, because of the damned dog picture. My family yelled at me, and I was excommunicated, because they assume it was a prank I played.
After a long time of patching things up with my family, I've reformatted the phone with Disk Manager and then restoring it. I declined to jailbreak it again - I'd rather play the real McCoy. Sometimes walled gardens are better to play in.
Credited to Notdavidbowie
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