Shufflepuck Café (PC)

While a simple air hockey game you control by moving your mouse might have had some mileage on early home computers, the team at Broderbund decided to get a bit more imaginative with it for their game Shufflepuck Café. While its release on MS-DOS leaves out the story of an intergalactic salesman whose spaceship has broken down, you immediately get a hearty dose of grungy science fiction as you start up the game, the player transported to a bar of rough looking aliens with low lights and cigar smoke to accompany their looks of disapproval. This is the Shufflepuck Café thankfully, so while some of these characters certainly look ready for a scrap, everything is settled here on the air hockey table.

Shufflepuck Café’s control are basic and intuitive, the player moving their paddle around their side of the air hockey table just by moving their mouse. If you move your paddle into an incoming puck with some force you’ll speed up its travel and you can influence the angle of your shots pretty easily. You can press a button to shove the paddle forward which is a good way to guarantee a certain amount of force, although that does make deflecting it at strategic angles a bit less likely. Beyond these basics you don’t have any actions to worry about, and for the most part the opponents controlled by the game follow the same rules as you. You alternate turns serving after someone’s scored a point and each match is a contest to earn 15 points first by getting the puck past the opponent’s paddle to shatter a pane of invisible glass in their goal area. Besides having the goal represented by that visual effect though this isn’t too out of the ordinary, but when you start playing against some of your alien opponents you’ll begin to see how Shufflepuck Café tries to spice up the game.

There are 9 unique opponents in Shufflepuck Café, the player able to challenge them to a game by clicking them as they stand around in the bar or they can face 8 of them in a tournament format. Each of these 9 challengers plays the game a bit differently, the game less about standard air hockey play and more about learning the particular quirks of an opponent and exploiting those to earn yourself the win. There is some more traditional air hockey to be had still, the character who offers it most cleanly being the robot waiter DC3 who does not participate in the tournament due to their specific unique characteristic. Rather than having a gimmick to how they play or a weakness to exploit, DC3 is a programmable character, the settings menu for him perhaps a bit to precise without explaining itself well but the ability to craft an opponent to put up however much of a fight you desire definitely helps the game retain some appeal after you start to understand the 8 other opponents, but it still feels like they will be the ones carrying the experience because they can offer a bit more than standard tactics.

Princess Bejin, despite being one of the later opponents in the tournament, displays this game’s interesting approach to air hockey best. Whenever it’s the princess’s turn to serve, she’ll influence the path of the puck with a magic spell, the player needing to pick up on certain cues to determine how she’ll fling that puck towards you. Deflecting that first serve is key to staying in the game against her, but after the puck has been kept in play she’ll play a more standard game until the next time she’s serving the puck into play. When an opponent has a pronounced gimmick like Bejin’s you’ll often find this is the flow of the game, the player needing to find out the one special twist a character has before they can slip into more typical deflection focused play. Some character may have a unique aspect that influences their long term capabilities so it’s not always as direct as watching your opponent do literal magic and there are a fair few opponents who just play the game rather well with no extra tricks up their sleeves so meeting a new character does come with a bit of mystery. Princess Bejin is probably the best execution of what makes the game unique though, the quality of other characters fluctuating quite a bit even though the enjoyability of the experience rests on their shoulders.

Two particularly unexciting characters exist in the form of Skip and Visine. Skip’s twist is he is just awful at the game, often barely hitting the puck with enough force to send it towards your side and slow to react to incoming shots as well. Essentially a joke opponent, he’d be easier to tolerate if 15 point matches weren’t slowed down to a crawl by his obnoxious play method, and Visine is only barely a step higher than Skip in his strategy. While his paddle seems to move erratically, it also seems to move with little purpose, his deflections often just as slow as Skip’s but with the added detriment of a bit more competence so the match is still easy but also a little harder to rush through. You face these characters back to back at the start of the tournament mode and it serves as a very poor first impression if you dive in there, but luckily the tournament’s rules aren’t too strict so if you do lose a match, so long as you saved before doing so, you can reenter the tournament and load that save to start a fresh match with the last opponent you were facing.

Get past Skip and Visine though and you start moving into a sort of sweet spot for quality opponents. Here is where you’ll face opponents like Eneg the pigman in military dress and the rich alien Lexan who always has his drink in the hand not holding the paddle, this short stretch a mix of characters who just play the game well enough to be challenging or have a unique effect applied to how they play. By mixing in some normal players it actually helps obfuscate some of the subtler gimmicks well as you try to connect the dots and determine if there is even some trick to overcome, but near the end of the tournament there are at least two opponents who aren’t that enjoyable to play against. One is a character whose play style does have a special twist to it but once you discover it, beating it is less about an interesting back and forth with a new strategic consideration and more about looping the same exploitative trick to eventually get all 15 points needed to move on. Sadly, the tournament’s champion is also a letdown, Biff Raunch looking like a pretty grounded mean biker dude character and having no special abilities but instead just playing with absurdly high skill. Were he just particularly gifted at air hockey he’d be a hard barrier to victory, but rather than being about trying to set up shots to slip past him, facing Biff feels like a matter of endurance until finally a puck just manages to slip past him. Many of your opponents will slip out of their gimmickry when they need to be defensive, but Biff just reacts with uncanny speed to most strategies and actually putting in the effort to beat him doesn’t feel as rewarding as beating a champion should be.

Luckily the tournament mode isn’t the only way to face Biff or anyone else, the player able to potentially practice against each opponent one-on-one by selecting them in the bar to learn what their play style is like first. These games also allow you to alter the rules if you want to give yourself a handicap. Already your opposition sometimes use different sized paddles than you, but in the bar games you can freely open a menu to change your paddle size as you see fit as well. You can make things rougher with a little one or practically fill your goal with an enormous one, the game unafraid to let you embrace ridiculousness if you so please. You can also alter a few other settings like placing a bumper in the middle of the table players will need to hit the puck around. It’s an interesting feature that can make playing DC3 in particular more varied than it already is, practically giving you your own little twist to turn back on the AI opponents although only outside of the tournament play. Naturally if you did have a trick for that mode it would have to be more balanced to avoid robbing the game of its difficulty, but facing foes outside of tournament mode ends up seeming the better option anyway since tournament essentially just places them in order while demanding little things like beating Skip and Visine back to back. That extra bit of freedom to pick who you play and how you play as you please definitely feels like Shufflepuck Café’s better format in the end, and since there’s no real story or much of a reward for beating the tournament in this version of the game, prospective players are probably best off playing against who they like.

THE VERDICT: Shufflepuck Café hits on an interesting idea of having air hockey where different opponents can introduce special conditions to play, but the ideas chosen for how this unfolds aren’t always the best. A few are barely challenging while one character simply has near perfect play as his gimmick, but the other half of the cast nearly make up for it by tapping into the idea’s potential much better. The tournament mode is harmed by the pushovers, but there are a few good alien characters that provide an enjoyable bit of reflexive action and strategies that shift to overcome the opponent’s play style. It is almost a numbers game on whether the weaker players balance out the better ones, but some extra options like customizing yourself or the robot waiter outside of the tournament format means Shufflepuck Café isn’t held back too much by the times it does get slow and basic.

And so, I give Shufflepuck Café for PC…

An OKAY rating. Skip and Visine are far too slow of an introduction to the game’s concept and already carve out one-fourth of the tournament for content with little entertainment value, but pushing past them gets you to the chunk of the game worthy of your interest. Had Shufflepuck Café filled this stretch of opponents with more characters or had them exhibit more play style variation than it would be easier to accept that the start and end of the tournament has less than thrilling players. Facing characters one-on-one in the bar was a wise way to let people jump in and face the better AI players as they please, and the ways you can customize things gives this short air hockey game in space a bit more longevity. Tinkering with the features of your own play or the robot waiter means that you don’t have to return to old opponents who might be less exciting once you learn the way to play that beats out their tricks, but Shufflepuck Café also balances that out a bit in that sweet spot with the opponents who can hold their own even after you know what they’re up to. One thing that could definitely lead to a more even and varied experience would be opponents who maybe moved through multiple tricks as the game goes on. Skip starting off as barely able to play could be a fun joke if he eventually found some more interesting gimmick, but slowly earning 15 points against a character whose behavior isn’t evolving is what holds back the game’s less thrilling moments. You do still have solid concepts like Princess Bejin who show the potential this game has, air hockey’s usual focus on quick action helped a fair bit by brief moments where you need to think a bit more beyond how to make the puck ricochet nicely.

Pack the bar with more interesting characters and Shufflepuck Café would definitely be worth a visit. However the approach to the concept didn’t always bring with it opponents who are more interesting for their unique quirks, the game needing to focus more on things that impact the interaction between both sides of the table in a positive way. Giving an opposing player a tool or trait that necessitates the right response from the player gives this people more to do beyond play air hockey well, and while it may not be the best sport for tackling this concept since it does necessitate some moments of straight reactive play when the puck is moving too quickly, characters like Princess Bejin show even just a brief injection of variety can add a small bit of nuance to earning your wins. While enjoyable at times because of those more interesting characters, the Shufflepuck Café needs a better clientele to spice up the air hockey action.