Overall 6.3 Graphics 6 Sound 5 Addictive 7 Depth 4 Difficulty 5
5.5
Bare-bones basketball still manages to be enjoyable TheScarletSaiyan
The Atari 2600 is well-known for being an old school console and thus being about as simplistic as you can get, sans the Magnavox Odyssey. Since it was released in 1977, most of its games were pretty bare-bones in terms of what they had to offer. It was common to get nothing more than a few basic squares and shapes with a background that consisted of just a few colors, with the sound effects being all about beeps, boops, and explosions. With that said, Atari 2600 sports games were no different from most of the system's library, such as Basketball, which is... Basketball. The name may not be creative but it doesn't need to be; the game is all about basketball and nothing more.
I'm going to guess this game takes place during a Los Angeles Lakers practice, since one of the players is yellow and the other purple. Their movements pretty much consist of stomping their leg, about as basic as one would expect from Atari. Premise-wise, it really couldn't be much more simple; two people play a game of one-on-one and whoever scores more points in four minutes wins. You can move, shoot, and steal the ball. You can decide whether or not you wanna play alone or with a friend but beware, because this game has a very unique flaw:
selecting one-player gives you two-player and
selecting two-player gives you one-player. Who knows why that's a thing but it is. As for sounds, you've got the sound of dribbling, making a basket, and that weird noise when players are right next to each other and the ball is in a... questionable spot. The ball by the way is a square, because that's the power of the Atari 2600 for you. After 4 minutes, whoever has more points is the winner, and if it ends in a tie than... nothing happens. I guess I shouldn't expect an early game to have an overtime system, but it would've been nice to do so. It's worth noting that the AI doesn't miss very often, so you gotta be careful and make sure you hit as many shots as you can. In the end, you just play until your hearts content and see if you can score more when four minutes are up. Actually you can keep going when you run out of time but the score won't count.
I find this one strangely entertaining, mainly because of how simple it is. If I need to kill four minutes I'll sit down and see if I can outwit my opponent and keep the ball away from their grubby mitts. If you wanna keep the game low-scoring, you can do so since this was before the shot clock (there are no fouls whatsoever by the way, or timeouts or anything like that). If you wanna go high-scoring, feel free to do so. Basketball for the 2600 doesn't offer much (there's not even a crowd), but it's got a charm that has me visiting it to waste time.
Graphics 6 Sound 5 Addictive 7 Depth 4 Difficulty 5
Review Rating: 3/5
Submitted: 02-03-16
Review Replies: 2
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