Portugues
Reverse Mermaid Hockey
Saved games stay in this browser only.
About the game
Picture a mermaid the wrong way round: the head and body of a fish, standing on a pair of human legs. Now give two of them an air hockey rink and a shrimp for a puck. That is Reverse Mermaid Hockey, a joke that turned into a fast little game.
You control the fish on the left and the computer plays the one on the right. The goals are the four round pockets in the corners of the rink: knock the shrimp into one of the two on your opponent's side to score, and keep it out of the two behind you. Your fish can roam only its own end, up, down and a little forwards, and it hits the shrimp by kicking it with its feet. Each kick speeds the shrimp up and fills your kick meter; with the meter full, a press of the button sends it flying straight across the rink.
Before each match you choose how many goals win it, from one to seven. Win and the spell is lifted, in one of three different ways.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Arduboy, the open, credit-card-sized handheld with a tiny black-and-white screen: a new game by independent developers, not a commercial release. It runs here in Ardens, an Arduboy emulator. Click Play now, choose PLAY, set the number of goals with the arrows and press X to start. CONF switches the sound on and off.
F2 saves the complete state of the game at any moment and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too. The HELP screen is empty in this build (it used to show a QR code pointing to the team's old website), so the controls are below.
Controls
| Key | Arduboy button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Arrow keys | D-pad | move your fish |
| X | B | serve the shrimp; with the meter full, super kick |
| Z | A | pause (Z again resumes) |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the state |
A few things worth knowing
Kick with the feet. Only the lower part of your fish, where the legs are, kicks the shrimp forward and charges the meter; a hit with the body just bounces it.
Two kicks charge the meter. Then wait for the shrimp to come to your feet and press X: the super kick goes straight and fast, and it is hard to stop.
Guard the corners. All four goals are in the corners, so the middle of your end is the safest place to wait.
Credits and licence
Reverse Mermaid Hockey was made in 2015 by TEAM a.r.g., with code by dragula96 and art by JO3RI and UncleSporky, and thanks to MLXXXp for moving it to the Arduboy2 library. It is free software under the MIT licence, and it uses the Arduboy2 (BSD) and ArduboyTones (MIT) libraries by Scott Allen. The team has since disbanded; its games are kept by the Team-ARG-Museum archive on GitHub. The version here is built by us from the archive's source code, which is linked from this page with the licence texts.