It wasn’t MacPaint that won me over to the ingenuity of the computer mouse. It was Shufflepuck Cafe, a black-and-white air hockey simulator that felt completely authentic except for the lack of air jets cooling off your hand.
The iPhone’s touch screen can’t replicate that wrist-fatiguing thrill, but seems more than adequate for on-the-go face offs. Another simple wrist-action game, Skee-Ball, is responsible for my first multi-hour app marathon thanks to a sweep-and-tilt mechanism that does an impressive job of recreating the century-old original.
Air Hockey Arcade, the most recent of numerous air hockey apps, gives the simple concept the full-blown X-treme treatment with power-ups, exploding “hot potato” pucks, fights, bottles to dodge, dynamic 3D cameras, and multiplayer options both on the device and via network (Bluetooth and WiFi). There’s also extensive customization of everything from uniforms to goal sizes, achievements to unlock and challenge modes.
There’s no question AHA looks great and the flourishes are entertaining. But several previous air hockey apps have come up short in one way or another when it comes to gameplay: rink is too small, controls lack precision and/or the physics are off. AHA suffers a bit of all these flaws.
Those big, detailed hockey goons are more fun to look at than the old plastic discs and you can control the puck better using sticks in a manner similar to those tabletop games with sliding players. But their size obviously shrinks the rink, and the angle and speed of shots don’t reflect your finger sweeps with the simple precision of the old Shufflepuck.
It’s hard to overlook those glaring flaws, but the long list of extras offers enough to merit AHA a tryout – with one major irritation of note: almost no instructions on how all those configuration/gameplay options work.
Selecting opponent AI, puck speed and camera views are probably intuitive enough for anyone capable of downloading an app. But it’d be nice knowing what power-ups exist (shrink/enlarge and supershots are among them), how the entertaining in-game fights start and their impact (the loser is temporarily dazed), and what options such as the “machine pucker” challenge are (a rapid-fire shot-on-goal contest).
That said, spicing up the basic game with options like hot potatoes (pucks that stun by exploding with user-defined frequency) and dodging flying bottles kept me playing far longer than I expected after the letdown of the basic mechanics. The default dynamic camera never caused the problems with ill-timed or confusing shifts frequently encountered elsewhere. The multiple two-player options are another big plus, but the overall franticness makes the difference between a computer and human opponents less noticeable than many other sports sims.
It’s odd the original Shufflepuck – now playable as a remake on all kinds of platforms – is still absent from the app arena despite the numerous titles obviously inspired by it. World Cup Air Hockey is still probably the best of the bunch when it comes to gameplay, but until something comes along that gets it right Air Hockey Arcade is a contender thanks to its sheer entertainment value.
By Mark Sabbatini
Air Hockey Arcade by Rafal Januszkiewicz $2.59
Platform Reviewed: iPhone/iPod (Requires iPhone OS 3.1 or later)
Category: Sports
Languages Supported: English
Rating: 4+
File Size: 15.2 MB
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[…] Mark_Sabbatini пишет: It wasn’t MacPaint that won me over to the ingenuity of the computer mouse. It was Shufflepuck Cafe, a black-and-white air hockey simulator that felt completely authentic except for the lack of air jets cooling off your hand. … […]
#2
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