Normal pool is normally not particularly exciting to play or watch, and often doesn’t translate well to the video game medium. That’s not entirely true. Technically, it translates just fine, but pressing buttons just doesn’t really feel like pool. So steps might be taken to jazz up the game. Steps to play with the fundamental rules of the game and the laws of the universe. Steps that would end up giving you Lunar Pool.
Lunar Pool is a lot like regular pool. You have a cue ball and lots of differently colored balls. It’s your job to whack the cue ball around in such a way that it smashes into the other balls and knocks them into the holes into the table, but is not itself knocked in. Lunar Pool differs in two key areas: table layout and basic physics.
In normal, non-lunar pool the table is a rectangle with holes in the four corners and in the middle of the long sides. In Lunar Pool the sky’s the limit! Within the confines of the NES’s ability to render graphical splendor, you’ll find tables that are square, oblong, round-ish, or shaped like a tangram puzzle, with pockets that might be against the rail, in the middle of the table, or possibly behind bumpers. It’s kind of like mini-golf, but without the putters.
In boring normal pool, you are a slave to friction. This makes the balls behave predictably, and eventually stop rolling. In Lunar Pool you can turn that pesky friction up for a greater challenge or down for a… greater challenge. You could even turn it all the way down to ‘off’ and the balls will not stop until they are all off the table, which isn’t really all that fun since you only get to hit the balls once and then you lose, even though it does take a while.
I was never able to figure out where the ‘lunar’ part came in.