Racking up Credz isn’t hard for a skilled player. Each of the other players also has a trick shot, and if you’ve mastered that character, you can equip their mallet and puck and perform their trick shot on occasion, whether or not you’re playing as them. More serious players will be spending “Credz' on unlocking parts of your opponents’ stories, and when you unlock their entire biography, you can play as them, with bonuses and penalties. The “extra wide mallet' helped… but not enough. I’ve read all the advice (from pushing your mallet forward to return a shot faster to the fact that you can “teleport' your mallet by simply touching where you want it to be: you don’t have to keep your finger on the screen the whole time), but I’m just too slow.Īgharta really is trying to “do freemium right.' There are a lot of things to buy, but none of them are disposable, and none of them allow you to buy victory. After literally hundreds of games, I’m finally about a match for “Furry,' the weakest opponent in the game. Then there are a number of people who crash-land on Athanor, stumble into the Shufflepuck Cantina, and proceed to get pucked over and over again by a furby. There are a lot of people who struggle for the first 20 minutes or so of play, but then “get it' and they’re on their way. There are the elite few who quickly advance to the third floor of the cantina (the hardest level, for now: more levels are coming) and find the opponents there mildly challenging. Judging from the forum, there are three different kinds of players of Shufflepuck Cantina. Shufflepuck Cantina has taught me the hard truth: my reflexes are shot. I thought I was pretty good, and back then, maybe I was. For example, instead of Café’s robot waiter, DC3, every level of Shufflepuck Cantina has a different bartender, starting with M4Rv1N, who seems to have worked though his paranoia and depression at some point.īack in the day, I loved playing air hockey at the local miniature golf course’s arcade.

There are also a few intentional parallels in style, like the distinctive “hol0graphic glass break' score effect, but it’s mainly a matter of the carefully developed setting.Īll of the Sci-Fi weirdos in Shufflepuck Cantina are entirely new and much more developed than their Café antecedents, but they share a similar sense of humor. Shufflepuck Cantina (Free) is actually an an air hockey, not shufflepuck (table shuffleboard) game, but it keeps the misnomer as part of its homage to Shuffepuck Café, one of the top Mac, DOS, Atari and Amiga games of 1989. The good folks at Agharta Studio have done something completely insane: they released a free-to-play air hockey (holographic mag-lev hockey?) game set in an immersive and silly setting best described as “Star Wars by way of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.'

Shufflepuck mac