Playing Pool at the Moon sounds like a bad trip but it's a good excuse to give some variety to a low-memory cart.

User Rating: 7 | Lunar Ball NES
The Good: Adjusting the friction of the table is great; simple though functional controls; good multiplayer.

The Bad: Graphics sometimes drop from "fair" to "poor"; some weird tables have terribly annoying pockets.

Lunar Pool was the first game FCI released for the NES back in 1987, and it started a good relationship between them and Nintendo which later resulted in other games under important labels, as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and Ultima. The game consists in a simple pool game (that you can play alone, or against a 2nd player or the computer) but it's fairly different from others because of the environment: the Moon (?). That means you can play in a wide range of different tables and balls arrangements (up to 60 stages) and (more important) you can also adjust the tables' friction, emulating gravity variation.

The game is nice because it has a good replay value in its simplicity. The controls work pretty well, and multiplayer is funny. The single player mode is OK too, where you have 3 shots to put down a ball: if you can't do it you lose a try; if you can go through a stage you gain a new one. The wide variety of tables' design helps the replay value to grow, and in the end you still have the friction to adjust before starting a game, making the balls stuck or float to no-end in the table.

Lunar Pool is a good game to fit the smaller possible part of memory for a NES cartridge.