Either way, it’s remarkable how well the game uses its mechanics to actually tell you something about the character and, in turn, how character informs the gameplay.Īs the challenge ramps up, your challengers become tougher, cooler customers. His puck erratically shakes across the table either through a lack of confidence or a chronic case of the tremors. His play style, brilliantly, is just as anxious as his appearance. The difficulty increases ever so slightly with Visine Orb, a bug-eyed alien only just tall enough to nervously peek over the table. He’s a complete pushover and a perfect way to ease into the game. Skip Feeney is Shufflepuck Café’s Glass Joe – a typical wimp who looks like Harry Potter in a hoodie. Tackle them in tournament order and your adversaries start out suitably meek and easy to beat. It is air hockey’s own Punch-Out!! where the cast’s personality quirks also inform their play style. Just like the Mos Eisley Cantina, this café is a wretched hive of scum and villainy populated by weird and wonderful alien creeps who, while they might not shoot first, will certainly not hesitate to smash the puck into your goal as quickly as you blink.įrom the iconic character select screen, in which each opponent either glares menacingly or glances shiftily back at the player, it’s clear that Shufflepuck Café isn’t just a sports simulation. I think the ultimate credit for total air hockey immersion really has to go to Shufflepuck Café’s opponents though. The delicate balance between the occasional sound effect and otherwise total silence somehow has the effect of making you feel even more… there. This was fairly common with Amiga games as limited memory made it difficult for both music and SFX to be played simultaneously – some even gave you the option of one or the other – but in Shufflepuck Café it feels less like a limitation and more like a directorial choice. Every match is tense, and yet there’s also something quite comforting about the way the immersive perspective wraps you in its hold.Īside from the title theme and a jaunty jingle played in between rounds, Shufflepuck Café is music-free, leaving you only with the ambient sound effects of the bar. As you play, all other concerns fade, and time stands still. You should feel afraid most of the alien patrons are degenerate thugs or powerful gang lords, but all that seems to matter to them is shufflepuck. You’re in a seedy bar on some planet, god knows where in the galaxy. Sit at a desk, let the glow of the cathode ray tube wash over you, and as the blackness of the room blends with that of the screen, you’re no longer at that desk. But the effect is a potent one nonetheless. Maybe it’s just an absence of detail, an attempt to conserve the power of the hardware, or a holdover from the game’s monochrome Macintosh roots, perhaps. There’s quite a lot of black in Shufflepuck Café. No, this is best experienced on original hardware, through a CRT monitor and in a dimly lit, if not entirely dark room. You can’t get the most from this game by playing on a crystal clear display, in a window, with your favourite collection of GIFs and a folder of tax returns beaming back at you. I find Shufflepuck Café is best played now, exactly as it was when I first discovered it on a mate’s Amiga 500 back in the Nineties. Every element of the game works to suture the player into its narrow slice of alternative reality so well that all else momentarily ceases to exist. But Shufflepuck Café’s great illusion isn’t just a matter of control. Presented from a first person perspective, your only avatar is an air hockey puck, controlled with absolute one-to-one precision simply by moving the mouse around. On a purely mechanical level, Shufflepuck Café is so simple that it’s genius.

Shufflepuck cafe characters