Puzzle Club

Overview

Puzzle Club 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. 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.