Although, for every subsequent visit the name on the Current Champion board simply said: “Some Chap”.Right now, certain times seem not so long ago and certain galaxies not all that far, far away. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I never purchased the Amiga’s colourful conversion.Īfter that initial session on a wet autumn Saturday I returned to the Café on my Uncle’s Mac frequently. But there was something truly beguiling about the smooth gameplay and raucous sound effects of the mac original. Shufflepuck Café was ported to many other systems and looks particularly good on the Amiga. Or…you can make it so wide that it fills the entire table and you can never concede a point! Take that General, you piggy bastard!! How do you propse to beat me now, General? M wah-ha-ha-ha!! You can challenge your skills by making it barely wide enough to hit the puck. Here you can beat your opponent or win the tournament with a single mouse click.īy far my favourite cheat is the ability to change the width of your paddle. Hilariously, the only thing you need to do access Shufflepuck Café’s cheat menu on the Mac is click a drop-down menu. On the Amiga accessing a cheat might involve a complicated code or button press sequence. If the 1980s was the era of rock-hard gameplay it was also the age of cheats. The sense of satisfaction you get when you beat the tougher opponents is massive. In Shufflepuck Café, a perfect game would only take about 25 minutes. Like most games of the late 1980s the difficulty curve was essential to its re-playability. Add to this the smooth animation of the puck and the expressive drawing of you opponents and you have a seriously addictive game.īut, oh my god is it hard!! Once you get through the first couple of matches the difficulty really ramps up. The action of sliding the mouse to hit the puck makes the game feel incredibly immersive. This is my favourite part of the game mechanics. Defeat Princess Bejin and she’ll provocatively reveal some cleavage When you get the puck past them there is a satisfying smashing sound accompanied by a brief but bizarre animation of the screen cracking where the puck left the table. You can choose to take on a single opponent from the eight occupants of the Café or play them all in a tournament.Įach opponent has various quirks to their game play to test your skills. Shuffelpuck Café uses a perspective trick to give a somewhat 3D feeling of playing air hockey against an opponent directly in front of you. “What does that word mean?” I asked, wide eyed and oh-so innocent!Īfter quickly navigating beyond this slightly embarrassing moment my Uncle set me up with my first game. On my Uncle’s Mac this read: “Some Cunt”. It proclaimed proudly the name of the Current Champion. The game was originally going to be a shuffleboard sim, hence it not being called Air Hockey Cafe!Īs I looked at the faces of my potential opponents staring back at me, my eye was drawn to the display board at the top of the image. I was impressed however by the detailed illustration of the café’s (ironically) colourful characters. Playing games in black and white was not something I was used to. As he fired up the Mac, I was initially disappointed by the monochromatic display. I do recall visiting my uncle one wet autumn Saturday and asking him: “Do you have any games on that computer?”įortunately for a bored kid on a rainy day my Uncle was able to answer that he did have a game for me. Being the child of an actor, music tech didn’t impress me much as a kid. He’s a prolific composer of library music and had a Macintosh Classic in his home studio. The only reason I’d heard of the future richest tech company in the world was my Uncle. In fact, my 10-year-old former self was barely aware that Apple existed. One brand that tended not to feature in playground conversation was Apple. In 1990, when a 10-year-old kid thought about video games on a home computer, they would have probably been picturing Sinclair, Amstrad or Commodore.
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