Pitfalls & Powerups – Sports Games

It’s almost the end of January, so by now all attempts to get fitter/thinner/less looking like a gelatinous blob made of Quality Street have all but most likely failed. So after two productive hours at the gym and that one early morning jog on the 2nd of January, it’s time to stay in the seated position and play old games about people physically exerting themselves for our amusement.

Now, as a particularly non-sporty type (shocker, right?) I also tend to stay away from sports games. But, if there’s one sports game I’d run a marathon to get away from, it’d be Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball. Set in the very extreme future and possibly concocted from a 13-year-old boy’s idea of a post-apocalypse world, Combat Basketball is sport with one rule: THERE ARE NO RULES! Except out, you can’t go out of bounds. Oh, or do a ‘backcourt’ … BUT THERE’S WEAPONS! Yeah, if the title wasn’t clear enough for you, this is regular Basketball but with weapons and suits added and referees removed (expect those who stayed just to call ‘out’). The weapons range from bombs to ninja throwing stars and just work to sort of push the opposing player away from you a bit. The combat suits come in an extensive colour choice of either red or blue and each sprite is cleverly designed to look exactly the same from birds-eye view (the game’s only view) so you get the added skill level of trying to work out which of the players you are, with no thanks to the tiny coloured arrows behind you. “But, Charlotte”, I hear you cry “This game still doesn’t sound infuriatingly difficult and rubbish enough yet!” Well, fear not, you freak, Bill Laimbeer made sure that all game actions are controlled by just one of the SNES’s many buttons. Every pass, block and attack is initiated by either pressing B or not pressing B along with the D-pad, which adds up to a hefty bill for a carpal tunnel operation. This futuristic, sweaty dystopia also seems to predict that by 2030 we will have less gravity as the ball bounce animation is so slow that it’s almost mesmerising. On a final note however, if you’ve played the brilliant Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, this whole game seems completely canonical to our post-Chaos Dunk future which might be its only crowning glory.

In contrast to pounding a single button with your now bloody stump of a thumb, Nintendo way back in the 80s were already unraveling their future plans for the Wii Fit. Exergaming was a relatively new concept and one that was unaffordable for the home gaming market at the time until Nintendo decided to stick twelve pressure pads between two sheets of plastic and christen it the ‘Power Pad’. The Power Pad was originally marketed as Family Trainer or Family Fun Fitness and was designed for use with a bunch of NES games that were seemingly made with the real intention of being used to test the strength of your living room floor and the patience of your parents every time you slipped over on it. Annoyingly enough, there was a Japan-only release that let you play as a Takeshi’s Castle contestant using the pad which is probably the main reason for my hatred of region-blocks. Regardless of that fact, Power Pad was a proper nifty peripheral that opened doors for two huge future markets – those who want to get fit and would rather get puffy and sweaty in the embarassment-less comfort of their living room while pretending to have fun (because, look, it’s a video game!) and the DDR-ers. Because, if you hadn’t already guessed, the Power Pad can be traced right back to the beginning of the dance mat’s ancestry and that’s what makes me love it so.

Of course, if you are reading this and still fighting fit with your new year’s resolution then what are you still doing here, reading this?! Go buy a dancemat and then at least you can get puffy and sweaty to 1998’s newest J-pop and maybe even Cameo’s Word Up if you’re feeling a little adventurous.