Lakers vs. Celtics and the NBA Playoffs (GEN) Review

Overview

Lakers Versus Celtics and the NBA Playoffs was released on the Sega Genesis in 1991. An earlier version of it was released for MS-DOS in 1989. It was the first game to be released in the NBA Playoffs series of games made by EA. This series, of course, would predate the NBA Live series of games. Aside from a few differences in terms of rosters and obvious graphical differences, this game is rather similar to its PC counterpart. I don’t really have a lengthy personal back story with this game: I just kind of found it on Vizzed one day. Let’s see if it holds up…

Graphics

Speaking purely from a graphical standpoint, you can tell that this was an early Sega Genesis game. Most of the colors in the game, from the opening splash to details on the court have a sort of old, washed out feel. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but I’m just saying that it’s worthy of note. For what everything does though, it’s fairly serviceable. Considering the category that we’re on, I won’t go into the menus here. Anyway, other than that little nitpick, everything kind of does its job in terms of identifying things. You can tell the basketball is a basketball, the net is a net, and so on. Strangely enough, the game doesn’t have center court logos. That would be added in games down the line. Not much else to say here…

Sound

For what little actual audio exists in this game, it’s, again, quite serviceable. I actually like the menu theme as well as the in game background music. All three of these tracks are very 90s style tracks loaded with that ever present Genesis twang, but they do their job in terms of getting you pumped for the action as well as keeping you going. While the net sounds are kind of papery, the sound effects themselves really aren’t that bad, and I’m sure that for the time that they were groundbreaking. Not much else to say there…

Gameplay/Difficulty

The gameplay presented here is a rather basic template for a basketball game. The basic rules are still intact, with a few differences between the arcade and simulation styles of play that you can choose at the main menu screen. Speaking of the main menu screen, there’s something interesting and worthy of know about how you pick your team in the NBA Playoffs series. You do it by hovering the cursor over the team you want and selecting a debate that team. Funnily enough, this game and its sequels stick very close to the name “NBA Playoffs” moniker in that you can only select the eight teams from the rounds of the tournament the previous year. You have to pick them from a sort of board set up instead of the usual list format. In a sense, it resembles NBA Jam. Aside from those eight, and also pick the two All-Star teams from the previous year. Due to the nature of the game, those teams will pretty much be the only way you get to play as certain players from teams that didn’t make the playoffs. You can choose between a time limit of two, five, eight, and 12 minutes of play per quarter. The main menu screen is fairly straightforward, so it’s pretty simple to jump into either a normal game or tournament, depending on your preference.

There are three difficulty levels: preseason, regular-season, and Showtime. As you can probably guess, their easy, medium, and hard respectively.

Summary

if I can sum up this game in one sentence, it would be the following sentence. Outside of a novelty playing a really early Genesis game and halfway decent basketball game, it’s not very interesting. I say that in terms of the game itself. Frankly, I’m sure the history behind this game and the rivalry it represents is far more fascinating in hindsight than the game itself. One last, quick note on the replayability: this game is good for one gone for now and then, though if you really want to, I suppose you could play the tournament mode.