“Ambition is the last refuge of failure.” -Oscar Wilde
Super Nintendo
Released in 1992 by Nintendo
Grade: D+
Don’t click away just because I’m giving this game such a bad grade. Its gameplay might be weak, but it’s not necessarily stupid, or at least not as stupid as you would think.
Where it falls in the series
This is the only entry in this series. The quasi-3D technology here is also seen in SNES games NHL Stanley Cup and Tony Meola’s Sidekicks Soccer.
Praises and gripes
At first, this seems like a choppy, slow-moving, and downright ugly basketball game. I mean, look at that blue space! It looks like the court is floating in another dimension!
The camera follows the ball and rotates around so the basket is always in view, scaling players to give you a sense of depth. It may have been impressive in 1992, but then why don’t I remember this game being very popular? This was on the market before NBA Live’s smooth-moving 5-on-5 basketball and NBA Jam’s supercharged 2-on-2 dunkfests.
Well, the gameplay just isn’t all that fun. Players are slow, they stop immediately when a defender is in their path, the controls are delayed, the dunks are unspectacular, and defense is frustrating. You hardly ever get a steal, and you really need to anticipate a shot to have any chance of blocking it.
But this game has some rare qualities, especially for a game from 1992. Whatever teammate you’ll pass to depending on your direction has a little cursor over his head in green, yellow, or red, to show you how safe the pass would be. That’s clever, right?
You can adjust defenses or offenses on the fly with the shoulder buttons, and they drastically affect how your team plays. In fact, I’d say that offensive teammates play more like real basketball players in this game than in any game for at least 10 years, if not more. They’re actually running plays! There are even explanations of each play in your coaching options menu. Did I say coaching options? Oh wow, yeah, there are those. You can choose for your team to crash the boards, and you can get them to be aggressive about getting on the fast break.
There are three CPU difficulty settings, back when those were hardly ever a thing in sports games, and with five conferences worth of teams to choose from, there’s a good range of challenges against the CPU.
The game isn’t super realistic, light on fouls, steals, and loose balls, but somehow it feels fairly genuine, with enough missed shots and logical AI happening out there. The gameplay woes make playing this game an exercise in patience, but if you’re determined, you may be able to have some fun with this.