Slow is far too slow to be of much use, so you want to be in fast mode all the time. Your paddle has two speeds it can move at, fast and slow. It all works as you'd expect and the paddle moves about quite smoothly, although there is one problem. Doing this will score you a point, and the first to fifteen points is the winner and gets to keep all their internal organs, you know, internal. 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. That's right, it's air hockey time again.
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