As a tabletop cue sport played at a slow pace, pool is a fairly obvious one to convert to video game format. For arcade developers of the 1980s, it didn’t take much from a design standpoint, given the simple and fixed overhead viewpoint remained the same across the board. The dealbreaker was on whether what was being played felt like a digital interactive version of pool – or as close to it as possible. Before finding success with Gradius, Bomberman, Castlevania, and Metal Gear, Konami gave it a go with Video Hustler.
The act of hustling is to deceive fellow pool players into making them gamble against a secretly skilful opponent. Video Hustler puts on a deceptive mask of its own, and it won’t take long for a purchaser of this ball game to realise their mistake.
Forget any notion of getting down with 8-ball or 9-ball, for Video Hustler presents its own six-ball spin on billiards. The table is a familiar sight, with a bright green hue blinding the eyes until one of the many CRT filters is switched on, with six pockets lining the corners and sides. There is a major difference in this iteration of pool, though, which is that this is a score-based game that relies on sinking balls in specific pockets on each turn.
Every ball has a number, and every pocket has one too. If a ball is successfully potted, its number will be multiplied by that pocket number, which switches around after a ball is sunk or missed. The idea is to sink balls while tactically firing into the pockets that will reward with the biggest multiplier. Different to traditional pool rules for sure, with its own tactical spin tacked on. Given the arcade background, it makes sense that a score-based twist melded its way in, where three missed shots result in a game over.
What makes Video Hustler a pain to play is the reliance on a small dot to aim the cue ball around the table. There are no guidelines or visible cue stick, with this dot able to be moved around the edges and acting as a rough location for where the cue ball will be fired. Ignoring the annoying beeps made with every positional movement of the cursor, there is a frustration at the lack of a clearer visual indicator for the aiming of each shot.
This is only made worse by the physics of the balls, which make Video Hustler feel more like playing air hockey than any kind of pool game. A power bar moves up and down on each shot, with timing deciding which level is applied to the strike, but balls will still slide around as if on ice, making it hard to get a firm hold on things, resulting in a lot of reliance on luck. Even with the extra modes and online leaderboards introduced in this version, it isn’t worthy of the asking price.
