Give ‘n go get your money back.
Super Nintendo
Released in 1995 by Konami
Grade: D+
This is a unique but one-dimensional basketball game that’s easy as pie and slow as molasses.
Where it falls in the series
Konami was still making Double Dribble games on Genesis when they produced the Run and Gun arcade, and I suppose this is the console version of Run and Gun. Konomi moved onto the more realism-based NBA In the Zone series on PS1 and NBA 2Night on PS2/Xbox. So Give ‘n Go is on its own as far as console games go. The low zoomed-in baseline camera in this game also popped up in Slam ‘n Jam ’96 featuring Magic and Kareem for Sega Saturn and Panasonic 3DO, published by Crystal Dynamics.
Praises and gripes
The graphics are ambitious and impressive for an SNES game. The players are huge and detailed and stylized kinda like action heroes. The individual animations are fine, but they’re stitched together awkwardly and they … move … too … slow. The game doesn’t recreate the speed and smooth movements of basketball at all.
Ironically, there are a lot of fast breaks. You can just heave the ball down the court a couple times for an easy dunk, even after your opponent has scored. This happens all the time even on the hardest difficulty.
In the half-court set, scoring is almost as easy. You’re always only a pass or two away from a dunk.
This is all done with an unusual passing system. It’s like Tecmo Bowl, where you hit a button to shuffle through teammates and hit another button to pass it. It sounds annoying, but it’s oddly simple and easy. The cursor defaults to the best option most of the time, so you could pretty much play whole games by passing to the first option every time. The AI never seems to steal a pass. In fact, the AI doesn’t even go after rebounds and loose balls. They’re pretty braindead.
The zoomed in view becomes a nuisance when you’re on defense. You can’t see who you’re controlling when the other team brings the ball upcourt, so your best bet is to run near the basket and try to block dunks and inside shots. Blocks are satisfying, but it’s a pretty repetitive ordeal getting your off-screen player under the hoop.
In a human vs. CPU game, you always play offense on the far basket, defense on the near basket. If you’re playing human vs. human, that’s where things get even more hairy because someone has to play with the court flipped around, shooting at the near basket.
Somehow, it’s still kinda fun, even though you’re doing the same crap over and over. The default quarter length is 2 minutes, so even the game developers probably knew their game would be best enjoyed in very short spurts. In that sense, it’s a quintessential arcade game, but the speed and excitement are sorely lacking.