Air Hockey - Weeeeeee!!!!!

I love air hockey. ^_^ But as with most games I love, I'm terrible at it! Whenever I play in an arcade the game lasts only a few minutes, and then they want $2 again. (No thank you! I will pay for failure once, but no more than that!)

So what do I think of a free game of air hockey? I think it's perfect!

Let's play!

This lovely game is created by iWon, and they did a darn good job of it. You can pick one of several boards (blue skies in the above pic!), and you also have your choice of mallet colors.

You play in a tournament with the computer. There are three rounds in each tournament.

Is that a dinosaur wearing a purple wig???

Each round starts with 2 minutes on the clock. Whoever scores 7 points before the timer ends is the winner of that round. If neither party scores 7 points, then whoever has the highest score wins. Tie? Then it goes into Sudden Death mode. Whoever scores a point first wins the game, and there are two pucks in play!

You score a point by getting the yellow puck into your opponent's goal on the far right of the screen. Of course, the computer hits the puck right back at you, so you have to defend your goal too!

In my case, scoring is often hilarious. ^_^ At least 90% of my goals were accidental. (The other 10% were me knocking the puck backwards and into my own goal. Whoops!)

After each point there is a tiny break and you'll see a celebration screen, followed by a tally of the current points. The celebration screen might praise you for getting a point early in the game or announce that you just scored several points in a row!

Woohoo!!

The animations are short, but they made me giggle. Especially the one that says, "You scored! (On yourself.)"

I even learned a new phrase.

Thank you! *Takes a bow*

I got this image so many times and I had *no* idea what a Hat Trick was, so I looked it up. Turns out that in actual hockey, it's so hard to score a point that if a team scores a second point, it's called a Hat Trick. So every time you score a 2nd point in iWon Air Hockey, they call it a Hat Trick.

But uh... considering it's MUCH easier to score points in air hockey, it just seems odd to claim it's a hard thing to score two points.

Moving on!

You earn bonus points for finishing a round early. (The points are shown at the end. It relates to your token reward.) You can earn bonus points in many other ways, but unfortunately it isn't clear what you need to do. Just play and have fun with it. ^_^

I thought the computer opponent was quite good. It moved realistically, and provided a decent challenge for me.

Still, I won the majority of games, so the challenge wasn't *that* hard. But to be honest, I prefer when I win games. ^_^

Yay!! I win!! ^_^

For the most part this game is flawless. But there are two issues that may hinder your gameplay.

1. Heavy graphics. Air hockey is a fast game, and the speedy pace is mirrored here. However, sometimes my computer lagged for a few seconds during a game. Having an option for lower detail graphics would probably help, but alas, that feature is not offered. If you have troubles, try closing any extra programs on your computer.

2. Click to continue.

Yay!!! I win again!!

As previously mentioned, after every scored point you get a celebration screen and then a tally screen. To get back to the game you have to click "Continue." This puts your cursor on the right half of the screen. But you *play* on the left side of the screen, so you immediately have to move your mouse to the left after you hit continue.

I really dislike the way this is set up. Many, many times I hit the puck before I was ready because I was having to reposition my cursor/mallet.

These two problems aren't deal breakers for me, but they are definitely annoying.

Air Hockey is a progressive jackpot game with a max pot of $2,000. At the end of each game I had 10 spins (the max) to play with. Even when I lost on the first round I had 10 spins. ^_^

On average I ended up with about 7,000+ tokens at the end of a game. Not bad!


Reality Check
The odds of winning the progressive jackpot on Air Hockey are "no worse" than 1 in 20,000,000.
The odds a child (age 2-11) in the US has cavities in hir baby teeth are 1 in 2.37.

Wow. O_O


Final Rating

I've noticed that iWon is very good at making short games that are fun to play. Air Hockey is no exception. ^_^ The customizeable features are a nice touch, and the graphics are well done. The few flaws keep it from getting a perfect score. So! This gets 4.5 stars out of 5.