Original Release: Konami, 1987, NES
Early Famicom billiards game that never made it to the West
Exciting Billiard (Famicom Disk, Konami, 1987)
Where to Buy: ebay
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
Venture into the dank depths of the Konami Hustler Club, either creating up to four pool pros of your own or picking from some prefab dudes with their own portraits (including some questionably racious ones). Once in-game it looks like Tom Cruise is taking all your shots, however, no matter who you pick.
It’s too bad this never made it into English (not even a fan translation as of yet) as it looks like there’s a lot of shit talking during the matches. Also a nice little jazzy soundtrack and an appropriately loungey background for some good ambience. Konami probably did the best overall with little environmental mood-setting touches in their 8-bit sports games.
The fizzicks aren’t bad for a 2D pool game either, about as good as one can hope for in 1987, but aiming is necessarily limited and kinda clunky given the system and input limitations. The AI also takes a chess game-esque amount of time about deciding on its shots for some reason, so it’s best to just pick one opponent.
As with Konami’s entire little Exciting Sports run, it’s not really worth revisiting from the modern day but you’d probably have been at least satisfied with it if you picked it up in 1987. At the time on the NES I believe the only pool alternatives were the mediocre Side Pocket and the pretty bad Lunar Pool, so Konami did kinda dominate sports on the console with this series for at least a year or so.
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