Peggle is so addictive, it should come with a Surgeon General’s warning. And Peggle Dual Shot, the new version made especially for the Nintendo DS, makes it even harder to put down, since it lets you play Peggle anytime, anywhere.

A combination of pinball, pachinko and Breakout, Peggle has you firing a ball down a board of blue and orange pegs. Every peg you hit disappears, and the goal is to clear all the orange pegs from the board with a limited amount of shots. The game gives you power-ups and special bonuses to liven up the action, but the core attraction of the game is the simple yet engaging activity of trying to shoot the ball just right so that it bounces from peg to peg just the way you want it to.

Peggle Dual Shot is actually a combination of the first two iterations of the series, Peggle and Peggle Nights, with little extra content thrown in. So if you’re one of the many people who have already been hooked, the new portable version won’t offer anything new. For everyone else, however, Peggle Dual Shot may just become your next obsession.

Adventure mode is where the real meat of the game lies. It’s in Adventure mode you’re introduced to the 10 Peggle masters, each of whom changes the basic strategy through their special ability. For example, the first Peggle master, Bjorn Unicorn, lets you make more precise shots by showing you the exact arc the ball will travel after making your shot. Lord Cinderbottom (a dragon) can turn the ball into a fireball, which burns through pegs instead of bouncing off them. Each of the 10 masters has five unique maps that take advantage of their special powers, and Adventure mode concludes with five “master levels” that let you choose which master’s power to use.

Peggle’s core gameplay is plenty of fun on its own, but the developers went an extra mile and injected a bevy of personality and subtle humor into virtually every detail. For starters, the background of each level usually paints a scene, and the pegs themselves serve as accents. The background might be a spider web with the pegs strung along the strands. The pegs could take the shape of the waves on a river, a yin-yang or just about anything else.

What makes it especially creative, however, is that each level ties directly to the personality of the Peggle master. Kat Tut, a cat dressed in a Pharaoh’s headdress, has levels in an Egyptian theme, Claude the Lobster’s levels all have an oceanic theme and so on.

The best levels, however, are in Peggle Nights, in which the Peggle masters get to inhabit their own dream worlds. Lord Cinderbottom dreams of being a firefighter, Kat Tut dreams of being a circus performer, and Renfield, a jack-o’-lantern, patterns his levels after famous paintings, from Munch’s The Scream to Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. Very rarely do you find a puzzle game with so many cultural references.

After completing Adventure mode for both Peggle and Nights, the game sadly runs low on new things to do. All levels from Adventure mode are again accessible in two new modes, Quick Play and Challenge, the latter of which presents such obstacles as “Clear the map starting with only 2 balls” or “Score over 300,000.” There also are 10 exclusive new levels designed by Q Entertainment, the publisher for Dual Shot.

What I was hoping to see, however, was a completely new mode of play that took special advantage of the Nintendo DS’s special features. Especially given the name “Dual Shot,” I was a little surprised to find that this is a straightforward port of the PC/Mac downloadable game. The closest this game comes to a new play mode is a special bonus level in which you bounce the ball around a screen to collect gems.

The graphics are a bit less sharp than they are in the original, given the DS’s limited resolution, but the gameplay and physics feel identical. The game can be played with either the buttons or the stylus, but I vastly preferred using the buttons. When you’re trying to line up a precise shot, there’s nothing more frustrating than accidentally sliding or tapping the stylus and messing up the entire thing.

There’s also a disappointing lack of multiplayer capabilities. Two players can take turns firing balls on a single DS in Duel mode, but that’s about it. Peggle remains a solo affair.

Though it’s a relatively short game overall, Peggle Dual Shot is more than capable of eating many hours of free time with its addictiveness, attention to detail and oodles of personality. Peggle remains just as addictive — and just as short — as ever.