In this age of social distancing, what better way to shoot some pool than on your NES?
Interestingly, this game received the endorsement of the Billiard Congress of America. Surely this means it’s very good and accurate, right? I’m going to assume you know how pool works, so I won’t spend much time explaining that. What’s more likely to separate Championship Pool from similar games is how well it re-creates the game and how robust its feature set is.
Let’s look at the first one of these aspects first. Regardless of which mode you’re playing, setting up a shot is relatively simple – the d-pad lets you decide where to aim (and, to some extent, show you what ricochet(s) to expect), the B button lets you adjust how hard you hit the cue ball, and the A button puts the ball in motion. Within the pause menu, you can also adjust the spin on the ball (it’s a shame that this is buried within a menu, but there are only so many NES buttons). Ultimately, you have all the control over your shots that you would want.
Up next is the game’s modes – this is the aspect of Championship Pool that surprised me the most, as there are a lot of them. There’s ‘Tournament’ mode for competitive play, a ‘Challenge’ mode for single-player games with various objectives, a ‘Party’ mode where up to 8 (!) players can play in an impressive number of different formats, and ‘Freestyle’ mode where, as the game notes, there are no rules:
The solo challenges do things like giving you a 9-ball rack and three ‘strikes’ to try and fully clear it. These are a lot of fun, and a great way to learn how the various formats work. The game also isn’t above telling you that you suck:
I can’t believe I’m about to type what I’m about type here, but honestly…this is really well done. Championship Pool gives you an abundance of game modes, a ton of control over your shots, and does a good job of explaining the rules of its various games when necessary. Its physics ‘engine,’ whatever form that actually takes, also seems rather robust and reasonably accurate. When you press ‘A’ to begin a shot, the game will often stop for a second or so to “load” the proper calculations (note the little ‘watch’ in the screenshot below). That may sound like a drawback, but I like to think that it’s taking the opportunity to correctly think things through, which is fine by me.
No one would blame me for expecting very little from an NES billiards game, but this is honestly a truly impressive package. The potential audience for a game like this, especially in the year 2020, is probably fairly small, but I swear to you – if you’re interested in something like this, Championship Pool is genuinely a must-have. It’s an early April miracle.
We’ll be sticking with the NES next week, for one of the most notorious and frustratingly difficult games on the console. I can’t wait to be pissed off for days on end. See you then!