![]() ![]() You use the d-pad to move your paddle and try to hit the puck past your opponent's paddle and against the back wall. I'm sure I don't need to tell you how this works, but I'm going to do it anyway otherwise we'll both be sitting here in silence, awkwardly clearing our throats every now and then. He's probably a serial killer who specialises in posing his victims like life-sized dolls at a tea party. He's new to air hockey and he looks like a typical nerd, but I'd be cautious - he's sitting in the (apparently) dangerous Shufflepuck Cafe without being hassled or violently murdered, so there must be something else to him. I thought this was all there was to the game, until I looked online and found out you can click the "champion" sign to enter a tournament and face each character in turn. This screen is sort of a hub area, and you can click on each bar patron / weirdo to engage them in an air hockey duel. To be fair, the first thing I did on Dark Souls was kick a zombie off a cliff and that always makes me feel at ease, but still: the Shufflepuck Cafe is not a place for the faint of heart. Just look at these guys! I started a game of Dark Souls at the weekend and that felt warm and inviting compared to this. Walking into a bar and having everyone in there stop talking and stare at you like something out of An American Werewolf in London is, as I can attest from personal experience, pretty goddamn unsettling. which promptly falls silent as the inhabitants turn to stare at you. Not a shufflepuck tournament, though: the game is rather misleading on that front. You need to use the telephone to call whatever the interplanetary equivalent of the AA is, but to get to the phone you must first beat the degenerate patrons of the Shufflepuck Cafe in a tournament. You're tootling around space, looking for the next astro-senior-citizen to fleece with your overpriced cosmo-wares when your rocket-car breaks down and you find yourself at the Shufflepuck Cafe of the title. You're the galaxy's top salesman of Krypton-3, a substance that is never defined but which I assume is some kind of futuristic encyclopedia set, or possibly a revolutionary new miniature vacuum cleaner. And why would an air hockey game need to be in English? Why, so we can experience the fabulous story, of course! Luckily there's a translated version by someone calling themselves MadHacker, (unless that's their real name, in which case I can only offer my condolences,) so we can enjoy the game in full English. Shufflepuck Cafe only actually received a Famicom port in Japan: for whatever reason, the West was deemed not ready for the kind of thrills only high-speed intergalactic bar games can offer. That's partly because of a graphical factor that I'll talk about in a bit, but mostly because I haven't played a NES game for a few weeks and I was starting to miss them - after a while, my feeble brain starts craving the simplicity of two-button control systems. Shufflepuck Cafe was originally developed for the Apple Mac, and Broderbund eventually ported it to many of the home computers of the time, but this article is about the Famicom version. Oh well, here's Broderbund's 1990 puck-em-up for the NES, Shufflepuck Cafe. Well, this is different - it's got robots and aliens and stuff. in space! What do you mean, we've already had one of these? Oh yeah, that one. This isn't your standard "neglected table in a cinema lobby" air hockey, though - this is air hockey. When one of the players manages to knock the hockey puck past the opponent’s bat, the player scores.Īfter a set number of points (usually 15) the match is over.That's right, it's air hockey time again. The bat on the playing field bounces a hockey puck between the player and the opponent. The game is controlled via the computer’s mouse. The player can compete in a tournament, playing against opponents who visit the Café, or can practice against each opponent to find out his/her/its weakness in a single-player match. The winner is the one who reaches 15 glassbreaks first. There are single plays or the tournament where you play opponents in order of difficulty. However, you can cheat as well, as you can resize your stick to fill the whole table width, or add one in the middle, and see who breaks glass first. There are several competitors, from which some of them definitely cheat, so be prepared to be laughed at. Deflect the puck around the walled area using your bat, trying to knock it into your opponent’s goal. You get a chance to match your skills at this Air Hockey style game, over ‘Cantina Band’ inspired music. One is the computer, and the other is, of course, you. ![]()
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