Developer: Pony Canyon Publisher: Pony Canyon Release: 10/21/90 Genre: Action
Air hockey is one of those things I have little experience with. There weren’t many places that had tables in my area surprisingly and I never did ask for a table for Christmas. So I could only look on with envy whenever it would show up in a TV show or commercial. Granted its essentially real life Pong but that does not mean it is not cool. Leave it to video games to make it even cooler by adding aliens and robots and shit. Shufflepuck Café is a good game of air hockey but that should not be surprising; you would have to go out of your way to screw this up.
Shufflepuck Café actually has a story if you can believe it. You are an intergalactic salesman and the best Krypton-3 salesman in the galaxy. Unfortunately your spaceship breaks down and you land on the nearest planet. The Shufflepuck Café is the nearest place with a telephone for miles. But standing in your way are eight degenerate shufflepuck players who will not move until you beat them in a match. God bless them they tried but this is the equivalent of giving a porno movie a plot.
Originally Shufflepuck Café was created for the Macintosh. But it would soon hit multiple platforms in the following years, from the Atari ST to the Amiga. It would even reach Japan and get versions on the PC-98 and X68000. That should not be surprising; at its heart air hockey is a simple game. The Famicom would receive its own version and since the game is so simple it is a great port. I am honestly surprised this one did not leave Japan; lord knows I would have preferred this over Spelunker.
As this was a computer game first the gameplay was designed around and benefits from the fine motor control of a mouse. The NES controller does its best but falls short of the precision of its computer counterparts. That being said it is still playable. Your paddle has two movement speeds, fast or slow. The slow option is not worth a damn but the fast one is a little too quick by default. The game offers a bunch of options to tweak various aspects of the controls. You can change the size of the paddle, its speed, how much it reflects off walls, and the force of friction. It is also generous enough to offer a practice opponent so you can test your tweaks out. While it is not perfect it goes a long way toward allowing you to tailor the experience somewhat to get closer to the real thing.
Shufflepuck Café is similar to Mike Tyson’s Punchout in that each of your opponents has a specific play style and skills you need to exploit in order to win. Skip is a good opening opponent with no tricks up his sleeve to ease you in. Vinnie is the closest to a traditional shufflepuck player and will return your serves like a human opponent. You will need to trick him to score but the question is how? Lexan is deceptive. At first he is aggressive but as he continues to drink during the match he becomes sloppy. Princess Bejin legit cheats by teleporting the puck to your side of the table. Nerual is not the final boss but is the hardest to beat as he mimics your movements. Like Nintendo’s game it is one thing to figure out the trick to beating your opponent. But executing it is another matter entirely.
The difficulty is very high and a bit unfair. That comes down to the control. At normal speeds it is easy to react. Once the puck picks up some momentum in one or two hits it becomes impossibly fast. The key to beating some of your opponents relies on careful positioning of the puck that the game struggles to manage. This means the AI will get some cheap easy points as you struggle to exploit their weakness. Because matches are fifteen points long the back and forth becomes tedious. I desperately wish there were an option to lower the score needed to win as it would improve the pacing so much. It is a flaw but one that I can live with.
In Closing
Shufflepuck Café is a solid game of air hockey. You have a challenging bunch of opponents to test your skills against and the implementation of the mechanics is probably the best they could manage for the time. The only thing missing is multiplayer which is a damn shame as that would make this the complete package. I love discovering gems like this; four decades after the NES released and its library still surprises me. I love it.
