Lunar Pool (NES) Playthrough
243A playthrough of FCI's 1987 pool game for the NES, Lunar Pool.
Lunar Pool is exactly what it sounds like. It's a pool game set on the moon.
The game's single-player mode is the star attraction. There are sixty stages to tackle, and you start by choosing which you'd like to start on (complete them all to see the ending!) and the table's friction. With no friction, the balls will roll forever until they fall in a pocket or cause a scratch, and when the friction is set to 255, they'll behave as if they've been fused to the table.
The shape of the table and the placement of the balls changes with each round, and you begin the game with three spare cue balls (extra lives). You lose one whenever you pocket the cue ball or miss three consecutive shots, and you're awarded one bonus ball for completing a round, or two for doing so without missing a shot. Lose them all it's game over.
Lunar Pool is a lot of fun and easy to sink a load of time into. The mechanics are easy to grasp - you can't put any English on the ball, so shooting is as simple as aiming a cursor and timing your button press with the rise and fall of the power gauge - but the high skill ceiling and the friction option do a pretty good job of making it both accessible to newcomers and challenging for more experienced players.
The graphics aren't flashy, but they're clear and sharp, and the vaguely catchy, low-key music has a style that makes me think "Sam's Choice Diet Marble Madness." The presentation is nice, but in case wondering why Lunar Pool, a late 1987 release, looks and sounds like an early-gen NES game - it is! (I
The game was originally released on the PC88 and MSX in mid-1985 as "Lunar Ball," and the Famicom port, Lunar Pool, came out in December of the same year. It was already two years old when it showed up in North America, but like many of Nintendo's black box games, the game wore its age gracefully and held up against newer releases. It still holds up now, too. Lunar Pool was Compile's first NES title, and it was a good show of what we could expect from them on the console in the coming years.
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