I’ve always loved playing air hockey at arcades. There’s something addictive about playing a fast game of air hockey to dominate your opponent. I remember one time; I played till my fingers started bleeding because it got hit by the puck.
Now that everything is moving digital, so has air hockey. An Australian based independent software developer called Platinum Apps has developed a game called Platinum Air Hockey. It is available on Android and runs on Android Honeycomb. It works on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, Asus Eee Pad Transformer, Motorola Xoom and many more.
You can choose to play 1 Player, 2 Player and even over wireless. There is both a free version with ads and a paid version without.
Since it just launched, there it has recorded just over 5,000 downloads mostly from the America and the UK.
David Stallard of Platinum Apps says that “We spent a lot of time making sure the game mechanics and gameplay were really good and really realistic, while also providing additional ‘venues’ to provide the user with some completely original themes that were professionally designed and I think they look great.
Regarding artificial intelligence, it really comes down to mechanics of the game, not only how the puck moves, but the speed at which it moves, the rebound speed when struck by the mallet, the force of the mallet, rebounds off the wall etc and took quite some time to get this working to the standard we were happy with. The next challenge which is more related to AI was making the computer play like a real person, varying depending on the difficulty level selected.”