Puzzle Club

Puzzle Club (パズルクラブ Pazuru Kurabu) 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.
== Gameplay ==
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.
== Play Online ==
These versions of Puzzle Club are either listed in the public domain or are considered abandonware. Clicking the game title will lead you to a playable online version of it from archive.org (mobile compatibility may vary).
* Puzzle Club (Japan prototype) (Arcade, 1990)
== Trivia ==
* Ms. Pac-Man and Blinky are misspelled in the credits as "Miz Pacman" and "Brinky". All ghosts also use their English names instead of their Japanese ones.
* The two-player mode reveals that the game was intended to be played on a cocktail table, as the screen flips upside down.
* Much of the soundtrack for the game is taken from Namco's own Sokoban Deluxe, which was released that same year.
*In the data of several Arcade1UP machines, Puzzle Club is listed in coding related to the Namco System 1 (NS1) BIOS. This may imply that Arcade1UP is/was planning to properly release the game; but due to the trivial nature of the particular code, this cannot be 100% confirmed.
==Gallery==
Untitled-1538715168.png|Likely unfinished title screen.
Untitled-1538715483.png|Gameplay.
Category:Games
Category:Namco Games
Category:Pac-Man Games
Category:Arcade Games
Category:Cancelled Games