Lunar Pool (NES)

Billiards mixed with mini-golf and played on the moon. There are some game concepts I just have to play as soon as I learn they exist, and the blend of pool and golf featured in Lunar Pool feels like such a natural avenue for video games to explore, the practicality of building various pool tables for this hypothetical sport no longer an issue in digital form. While the moon element is ultimately just an aesthetic choice rather than a factor, Lunar Pool’s still got a strong elevator pitch that feels like more developers would attempt to copy but seemingly haven’t.

Lunar Pool’s version of pool carries over a lot of the basics of pocket billiards. The player uses a cue stick to knock the white cue ball into the colored balls arranged on the table, the aim being to sink these balls in the pockets around the table’s edge. There is no focus on stripes and solids in Lunar Pool though, all balls fair game for the player to hit and there is no dangerous eight ball to accidentally sink or any need to call your shots. Instead, the challenge of Lunar Pool comes from the many strange shapes the tables come in, the game’s 60 levels featuring various designs that will complicate how you approach your goal of getting every ball in a pocket.

The table shapes are definitely the most important aspect of play, the player needing to have a good eye for how hard to hit the cue ball. Like regular pool, a subconscious sense of the trigonometry at play will benefit you greatly, and it’s not hard to intuitively develop one as you learn how the balls will ricochet based on your cue angle and the shape of the table borders. Describing aiming properly in pool can perhaps be a bit off-putting, but the physics of the game feel like a decent facsimile of the real life cue sport so natural strategies like grazing a target ball’s side or transferring the strength of the ball you hit into multiple balls don’t ask for any unusual considerations. You do lack the ability to put any spin on the cue ball and can’t skip it either, but the tables are all designed to be navigated just by using their geometry to your advantage. After the simplicity of the starting table, you’ll find yourself playing on tables shaped like triangles, alphabet letters, arrows, and some shapes too detailed to describe. A few of them do feel like their big gimmick is removing pockets or adding some small complications to an otherwise rectangular playfield like jagged borders or small barriers in the middle area, but there are definitely some creative concepts to balance them out that completely change how you approach your shots. Of particular note are the ones that use pockets more like traps, the player needing to carefully gauge their power to avoid sending their cue ball tumbling in after the target balls. The most memorable example of this might be a seemingly straightforward thin rectangle that requires careful navigation to get around the deviously placed pockets and sink the single ball.

The main game of Lunar Pool is a single player mode where you go through all 60 tables one after another, the player free to start from any table if they so wish. This feature definitely came in handy for me as Table 59 features tightly packed square blocks that the remaining ball and cue ball got stuck between, the glitch still unfortunate but the fact I didn’t have to start from the beginning when I was right next to the end certainly an appreciated feature. To win at a table only requires you to sink all of its target balls eventually, but there are complications meant to make you play carefully if you wish to earn a high score and continue a level streak. If you sink your cue ball in Lunar Pool, not only does it completely undo the results of your shot, it also reduces your Ball counter by 1, the Balls essentially being your lives in this title. Some levels are designed so that it’s fairly like you’ll lose a Ball if you put too much power in a shot or act carelessly, but other levels rely on a different means of potentially reducing your lives. If you make three consecutive shots in Lunar Pool and don’t sink any target balls on any of them, you’ll lose a life while thankfully keeping your cue ball’s current position. However, while it can often be easy to lose a cue ball or two, the game is flush with chances for extra lives. Clearing a table gives you one for free, and if you wasted no shots doing so, you get another one. If you can sink balls consistently, there are even more chances to get extra Balls. You start with only 3 Balls though so some tables still put up a fight if you haven’t built up reserves, but as long as you show some diligence you can eventually beat all of Lunar Pool’s levels.

An oddity with the table design will become clear if you try to play through every level consecutively. At some point in the 60 level experience, you’ll see table designs recycled, this seeming to happen around the halfway point despite a few unique tables cropping up after it. The game does attempt to shift the challenge somewhat by changing where the target balls are positioned to start, but it does feel like the game didn’t tap into its full potential. Many of the tables lean on weird borders or a different overall shape, and very few feel like enormous departures from the formulas featured in other levels. There is still a good degree of variety and even the reinterpreted designs manage to be enjoyable by being just different enough, but the game really doesn’t break the mold on what a pool table could be in a video game. The mini golf comparison feels a little less apt when you realize no barriers are moving and there are no themes to the holes, the general aesthetic featuring the moon’s crater-marked surface around the green table but not much else. The music settles into only one piece played throughout, so the appeal of the title almost entirely hinges on the mechanics, something that does at least deliver in both challenge and some degree of creativity.

Outside of the single player mode, there is the option to play with either another human player or the game’s AI. Player’s alternate attempts to sink balls, able to continue shooting every time they hit a ball into the pocket. Since the game removed the two ball types from play, it is instead a numbers game of sinking more balls than your opponent without losing too many of your own. You share the single cue ball, meaning you can sabotage the other player by moving it away from the targets deliberately if you can afford to do so, and there is plenty of potential for competition as you’re both angling for the same prey. The AI opponent isn’t quite up to snuff though, sometimes repeatedly sending the cue ball into barriers and borders as it can’t comprehend that there is an obstacle obstructing its path to a target ball. Multiplayer is definitely best pursued only with another human there to share the experience, and two-player mode is also the best way to experience Lunar Pool’s peculiar option to fiddle with the friction of the play field. If you so wish, you can change the game away from its standard number of 32 to either have a game where balls are much harder to hit around the play field or they move with so little friction they take forever to come to a stop. Good for a laugh or a good way to potentially mitigate skill struggles in stages where sinking the cue ball is likely to happen, the friction mode isn’t an option that really feels like it needs to be messed with but can add a silly layer of experimentation to play if you desire to spice the game up some.

THE VERDICT: The table designs in Lunar Pool may not always be ambitious and are sometimes repeated, but the new considerations the different shapes and obstacles bring to the gameplay make for a challenging game of pool alone or with a friend. The laser focus on making sure the mini-golf approach to sinking balls feels good and works reliably ensures the game’s mechanics remain enjoyable. While it could use more style to spice things up, Lunar Pool still explores the potential of its concept well enough that you’ll wish it had kept going.

And so, I give Lunar Pool for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A GOOD Rating. While the creativity in the pool table design was likely hampered somewhat by the hardware’s limits, it does feel like it could have explored its concept a lot more. That doesn’t mean the tables it offers are weak or unenjoyable though, the stages delivering on the gameplay premise to an appropriate degree. The fact the core systems work so well together is what makes it a bit sad to see the concept didn’t have the room to stretch its wings and really get crazy with what a pool table could be, but there are plenty of moments of inspiration found within the ingredients they use to construct the play areas. A modern reinvention of Lunar Pool could be everything that this game should have been, but for a game of its era, it did what it could to make sure that you still got the interesting twist on billiards even if it couldn’t take it to the extreme.

Lunar Pool takes the focus on proper angles and power featured in a regular pool game and hones it into a means of overcoming specially designed challenges. While it feels more like it’s lightly borrowing from mini-golf rather than outright blending the two sports together, Lunar Pool still still stands out amongst pool games for taking the skills usually reserved for simple competition on a single consistent play field and asking for more careful consideration and play. You won’t be over the moon after playing it, but if you enjoy pool, this recontextualization of its elements will definitely provide an interesting twist to the already entertaining cue sport.