ST-urday #010: Shufflepuck Café
By Mento 2 Comments
Greetings, fellow STalwarts, to another retrospective ST-urday. We're deep into PAX Prime as of right now. Various YouTubers and Twitch streamers are receiving their biannual (triannual? tetrannual?) time in the PAX convention limelight while more professional outfits like our very own Giant Bomb team perform in rooms not set up for internet streaming (ironic, given how many Twitch superstars are able to do so straight out of their bedrooms and living rooms with little problem). It's a rum state of affairs, that's for sure, though I mostly speak out of envy for those in Seattle who are able to watch the GB panel live later today.
It doesn't pay to be supercilious about this new movement of aspirant video game hosts, of course, as there's a lot to recommend from the innumerable nickel-and-dime video game coverage operations out there. I'm partial to Super Best Friends Play myself, and hold out hope that they managed to convince Ryckert or Jeff to shoot a promo for this month-long "Rustlemania 2" feature they've been doing throughout August. Collectively, though, I just find it... difficult, to ascertain the wheat from the chaff, as there is so much of both. That the younger audiences with more time and patience on their hands are able to do so sort of reminds me of when I was barely into my double digits, and would spend inordinate amounts of time on games of dubious quality that I'm no longer sure were worth my rapt attention. Your time is more freely given the younger you are and have more of it to spend, I've discovered, and it's helped a generation of new critics and entertainers with little more to their presentation than a wit (of a sort, in the case of PewDiePie and his equally histrionic contemporaries) and a webcam to find an ardent audience. There's a hint of iconoclasm and antiestablishmentarianism too, of tearing down the old guard and installing a new order, and I suspect something similar is what drew many of us to Giant Bomb: a site created in the aftermath of an unfortunate episode that, for all the world, seemed to exist purely to flip the bird to the world of corporate game journalism.
Man, I am getting far too melancholy and baroque with my nostalgia goggles today. You know what they say: If it ain't baroque, don't fix it. With that in mind, let's talk about cleavage and alcohol and playing some air hockey with the scum of the universe.
Shufflepuck Café
For the longest time I thought this game was the domain of the Amiga and the Amiga alone. Though I never owned a copy, I would frequently take turns playing against its multitude of opponents alongside an Amiga-owning friend of mine, simply assuming that - for whatever reason - the game did not see a release on its sister system the Atari ST. I might chalk that down to how, though this was rarely emphasized with any spite by the acquaintance in question, the Amiga of this Amiga-owning friend would frequently have games that never saw ST releases. This occurred more often towards the mid-90s, as both systems began to slowly die out in the face of the PC's overwhelming might. The ST, as the first to arrive, was also the first to die with the Amiga following a scant couple years later despite a misguided attempt to increase its longevity with the CD-based Amiga CD32.
(This same friend, incidentally, would be the first of my middle-school posse to have access to a PC - his elder brother's - and introduce me to many late DOS/early Windows mainstays such as Team17's Worms, Westwood's Lands of Lore and Command & Conquer, the bizarre point-and-click Monty Python licensed games and the original Diablo and Warcraft games from Blizzard. He did not have permission to play Doom or Duke Nukem, alas, or at least while I was around and could hypothetically tell my folks over dinner about how I gibbed a demon or told a stripper to "shake it, baby". At this point in my personal gaming career I had almost completely crossed over onto consoles, only occasionally taking over the family PC whenever an interesting RPG like Betrayal at Krondor, Daggerfall or Baldur's Gate showed up.)
Anyway, Shufflepuck Café. It's essentially 3D Pong from an angled perspective situated behind the player - a game perhaps more accurately described as an air hockey simulator - so it seems a little odd that the game would opt to give itself a sci-fi setting. Instead of air keeping them aloft, one could assume the pucks moved around the table due to some sort of repulsorlift anti-grav technology, and the glass-shattering effect caused by every point scored is simply a dramatic holographic projection. It also meant that the developers could have fun creating a "rogue's galaxy" of alien beings to challenge you: some humanoid, others less comprehensible to Earth-bound ken.
The history of Shufflepuck Café is a curious one, and one considerably divorced from my original assumptions. It began as a 1988 Apple Macintosh 128k game, of all things, created by the American game developer Brøderbund: they of the Carmen Sandiego edutainment series. The original version's art was stark and striking due to the Apple Mac's sharp monochrome monitor. The ports that followed for the Atari ST, Amiga and PC adopted its more well-known look: the grubby characters, the orange and red grid-like table, as if it was some kind of pitch or field for a different sport, and the blocky wood sideboard that was nonetheless far springier than it appeared. Odd to think that a sci-fi game would create an air hockey table that looks less sophisticated than any you'd find in a modern Arcade, but as we'll see shortly the titular Shufflepuck Café is a pretty run-down place itself. The most interesting thing I discovered when researching the game is that it also saw a Famicom port in 1990. Published by Pony Canyon exclusively for Japanese audiences, it added a bit more in-game backstory for its oddball characters and changed the portly champion Biff into someone that more closely resembled Double Dragon's burly bruiser Abobo. (Talking of Macintosh originals, I've really got to get around to covering one or more of the MacVentures series on ST-urday at some point... maybe once I've played my recently purchased copy of the 2014 revamp of Shadowgate.)
I was prompted early on to add Shufflepuck Café to the list of games to peruse for this feature because of the semi-recent Steam release of Shufflepuck Cantina Deluxe, which I wrote about here. I remarked on how close to the original it felt, for better or worse. It adds more reasons to keep playing other than the thrill of the fight, but earning all its meta-game goodies meant playing the same opponents far too many times than was palatable. It can't be easy to convert a game made in 1988, where concerns about longevity and value for money weren't quite as prevalent, to the 2010s where players expect a little more to keep them invested.
Then again, maybe not: I've come to realize that the reason many Indies do so well is because they rarely outstay their welcome. You pay a tiny amount for a game when it's on sale or in a bundle, beat it in a few hours, feel the price justified the time spent (when the game is actually well-made, at least) and move onto a dozen micro-experiences just like it in the same month. I think this incarnation of Shufflepuck Café would do just as well now as an afternoon's frivolity as it did back then when it was a graphically and mechanically remarkable coup. That's presumably how the Shufflepuck Cantina Deluxe people felt about it as well. Or maybe they just really liked the original and wanted a new version of it out there; there's been crappier reasons to want to create a game.