This is gonna be a surprising blog. Why, you ask?
By Video_Game_King 38 Comments
NBA Jam
( I don't know, maybe it has something to do with that?) No, I'm obviously not talking about the basketball music that played in that one shooter on an annoyingly infinite loop, nor the return of crystal clear PNG banners, but the fact that I beat a sports game. And not one of those Wii tech demo sports games, either; this is a real sports game with real sports people. I'm aware that most of you think my experience with any sports game would look a lot like the last ten seconds of this clip, and while I did suck pretty hard at the game, I am kind of autistic, so it wasn't all bad.Normally, I start with the story, but this is a sports game, so fuck that. Wait, I know: I can tell the story of how I came to play this game. Some time ago (my brain is no longer capable of registering time), I saw some footage of NBA Jam in Dalai's blog. I'm not gonna tell which blog until he pays me, for I don't advertise for free. Anyway, something about that video sparked in me a revelation: I could play that game! It's not like it's football, the Halo of sports (it's near inaccessible and speaking ill will of it will lead to your demise), or baseball, the turn-based sport (the only people who still care about it are most likely from Japan); this is basketball, the....um....Pong of sports. If you found that joke lacking, then you know how I felt when I actually started playing as the secret characters in this game, like Al Gore. Yes, Al Gore is in this game, which is reason enough to party Al Gore-style. Or it would be if Al Gore was actually any good. He's about as good a basketball player as he is a doll, and the worst part is that if you decide to play as a secret character, you HAVE to play as them. No supporting role for Al Gore, the Vice President of the 90s; this is his time to shine, and there's nothing you can do about it.
By now, it's pretty obvious that I know nothing about basketball, which explains why I went for an extremely cheap strategy. First priority: get the ball. Button mashing at the beginning usually works, not much there. Next, I take my sweet time making it to the basket. I know of the turbo button that lets me run and return to my farm on Kansas, but fuck Kansas and the ability to run, for neither are necessary to anybody. Not that it matters, since I soon noticed that the pace remains the same, no matter how fast you run. Oh, and speaking of unnecessary, don't pass the ball ever; you can't control the other guy, and they're just gonna waste it on a dunk. You know better than that. You're going to the corner for a 3-pointer, mainly because the guys who made this game never figured out what "equidistant" means. Sure, it's gonna miss a lot, but you've prevented the opposition from scoring a lot AND each one you get puts you ahead by at least 1 point, given that the computer loves dunks, even if they are Cleveland. Or any Eastern team, really; they all suck. Now add an audience that applauds telepathically, repeat about 900 times, and you've beaten NBA Jam. (There's no single player campaign, or at least it's not very obvious.) *preemptive record scratch* Yet none of that makes it a bad game. If I've learned anything from playing Wii Sports Resort, it's doing the same thing over and over again in a way not intended by the game doesn't help it. NBA Jam's still a good game if you have 30 minutes to blow and the right music, so I give it the Half Houral Sex Award.
Review Synopsis
- Bill Clinton's in this game, and unlike the latest NBA Jam, a Democratic president works here. (Hint: politicians don't work as joke characters if they're actually good at basketball.)
- Too bad none of the other characters work.
- A functional, if repetitive and commonplace game.
I'll never understand Earth politics. Why is Christine O'Donnell denying her witchiness? It's really obvious that she's a witch, and such a thing would really benefit you in the long run. Look at her latest ad, which I like to call "The Mindfuck":
Adventure Island III
( Hey, look, a standard game that won't confuse everybody involved!) Wait, it did exactly that!.......It's not often that I finish the opening paragraph in two short sentences. in fact...yea, I can't remember doing something like this EVER. Since I can't think of any way to add substance to this without fucking up the rest of the blog, please enjoy my insane ramblings. Or don't. It's not like anything I'm saying now matters to anything at all.Unlike this paragraph, which has some relevance. Still completely random, though, but that's the game's fault, really. Ron Jeremy's on this island with his sex doll, whom I suspect went through a Pinocchio-esque quest and became a real slut, when suddenly, a UFO abducts the crap out of her! It's now up to you and the Loch Ness monster to rescue your girlfriend. You accomplish this by following the UFO across the land and yelling at it, which probably explains why it runs away almost every time you visit it. That's not how you rescue a blow-up doll given life, Ron Jeremy! You yell at a UFO, and all you'll get are boss battles! Wait, you're riding a dinosaur that farts out fireballs? Fuck it, then; no boss in the game can withstand the power of dinosaur fireball farts. Just walk up to them, hold down the turbo button, and you'll immediately find out why the spaceship ran away in the first place.
And by liquids, I usually mean lava; dive in there with the right dinosaur, and you can find secret item rooms and warps. Kinda. They're not warps in the sense that you skip levels, but warps in the sense that you play different levels. "Then why use them?", you ask. We've been over this a lot: do not interrupt my blogs, damn it. Just for that, you don't get an answer. Instead, you get to hear me rant about how lazy the game is. See that picture up there? Two things wrong with it: I added Jack Skellington (it's the NES, obviously), and all end parts of the level look like that. I'm pretty sure I could've made that in MS Paint in the late 90s, back when all my computer knew was either a typing tutorial or a shitty Flash animation. You'll be seeing them quite often, mostly due to the fact that you can blast through the levels in under a minute by holding right and turbo, also known as the Kung Fu Master Stratagem. But the biggest way it's lazy? The game itself is just a copy of Adventure Island II. No, not in that pussy Mega Man way, where it's still another game; at one point, I actually consulted YouTube on the matter. I'm still not sure. To be fair, I should logically give it the same score I gave the previous Adventure Island, since I'd have roughly the same level of enjoyment with both games, given the similarities, but I'm way too lazy to look up scores in this behemoth. Besides, I'll buy into the illusion that it's a worse game due to my increased awareness of its flaws (one-hit kills are not fun), since that makes me as lazy as the game. OK, we even? Good. Sunday Funday Award for Lazy NES Copy-Pasting.
Review Synopsis
- The story answers very few questions. What grows when Ron Jeremy's blow-up doll lies?
- It's Adventure Island II.
- It's really damn easy.