Puzzle Club (パズルクラブ Pazuru Kurabu) is a cancelled puzzle arcade game developed by Namco in 1990. While it never has received any form of official release, the game's prototype ROM was dumped and is playable in emulators.
Gameplay[]
The game is very akin to slide puzzles, however the player must link the matching tiles into a horizontal row, as opposed to completing an image. Once a row has been completed, the blocks will turn to bricks, and cannot be moved. Two modes are present in the game - "Pacman Story" and "Floor Exercise" - with Pac-Man only appearing in the former.
Pacman Story features the Pac-Land incarnations of various characters, fully animated, as the tilepieces. Upon completing a level it shows an intermission, featuring a zoomed-in Pac-Man character that is identical to the regular tile(s). After thirty levels, the game ends, displaying the credits. The Floor Exercise mode is incomplete and impossible to finish; instead of Pac-Man tiles, it features generic slot machine graphics. In place of Pacman Story's intermissions, Floor Exercise also has bonus rounds, featuring a large puzzle of a girl lifting weights.
Play Online[]
These versions of Puzzle Club are either listed in the public domain or are considered abandonware. Clicking the game title will lead you to a playable online version of it from archive.org (mobile compatibility may vary).
Trivia[]
- Ms. Pac-Man and Blinky are misspelled in the credits as "Miz Pacman" and "Brinky". All ghosts also use their English names instead of their Japanese ones.
- The two-player mode reveals that the game was intended to be played on a cocktail table, as the screen flips upside down.
- Much of the soundtrack for the game is taken from Namco's own Sokoban Deluxe, which was released that same year.
- In the data of several Arcade1UP machines, Puzzle Club is listed in coding related to the Namco System 1 (NS1) BIOS. This may imply that Arcade1UP is/was planning to properly release the game; but due to the trivial nature of the particular code, this cannot be 100% confirmed.
Gallery[]
