I guess I've never talked about Shufflepuck Cafe, and old Mac OS game that I played my freshman year in college. This was on my roommate's SE/30, black and white with the rectangular mouse. This was a good game for the mouse. Most games can be played with a keyboard instead of a joystick and a mouse instead of a trackball, although if you have a trackball that's fine too. I have problems using a mouse to replace paddle controls such as the one in Breakout.

In Shufflepuck Cafe you play shufflepuck against about seven different opponents. Either ones you choose or, in the campaign game, each one in turn. The first one is Skippy, really easy as he sometimes misses slow shots. There is a robot who also sucks. Then there's an alien who barely peeks above the table. This one laughs when he scores a point and whimpers when he loses one. After that is some sort of orc who's an ok player but still easy.

I think up next is a robed alien who hits the puck back as hard as you hit it. So if you hit it hard, it comes back hard. But you have to hit it hard to beat him and he's pretty good at hitting the puck back. The basic strategy is to hit it to one corner, they hit it back, then hit it to the opposite corner. This also boils down to get his paddle on the other side of the board that you're sending the puck.

After the alien, there a female telekinetic. Very good player in her own right, but beatable. Her trick is that when she serves, the puck just comes down to midfield, in the center, and then it shoots to one corner or the other. If you have great reflexes you can still hit it back, but usually I missed it if I was trying to anticipate. I just picked a corner and left the paddle there: 50-50 chance of hitting it back.

The last opponent is Biff. Big macho guy who always hits it hard and to the opposite corner. This is guy is really good and it took me forever to beat him, finally at 15-11. This was after my two roommates beat him also, although not easily either. So it's a fun old game that I played back in the black and white days. Probably doesn't work on the current OS.

Speaking of which, I'm playing Joust and Defender. Digital Eclipse wrote an emulator for whatever Williams used for those games; and they licensed and sold Joust, Defender, and Robotron. This was back when a 68040 processor was a good machine, and 68030 was adequate for these games. On my PowerMac 6100 it was slower since the PowerPC processor was emulating a 68040, so I could play these games and especially on Joust get to like level 25+. I'm not much of a fan of Defender.

On my PowerBook, these games run really quickly. Not unplayably, but fast enough that I'm having a hard time getting past level 8 of Joust or level 2 of Defender. It's just one of those things that programmers tend to omit: speed limiter. They just write their games to be as fast as possible. If you base the timing on the clock then the game will run no faster than the base speed on fast processors. Of course this'll probably slow down the game a bit, so there are reasons not to do this. And there are other action games that do work fine on fast machines, so people are able to do it. I guess it's just a bit frustrating to be doing so badly in these games.