NBA Basketball (Intellivision, 1980)
Entry posted by Mezrabad
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NBA Basketball (Intellivision, 1980)
Wow, I've started and stopped writing this entry about five times. I'm just not sure what to say about this game. Like the era in which this game was born, I find it difficult to resist the temptation to compare it to the Atari Basketball title that proceeded it. As George Plimpton might've said, NBA basketball is clearly more sophisticated and lifelike than its Atari counterpart. There are three players on each team, instead of one, and you can pass the ball to your artificially intelligent team members. You can block shots, and you can choose to shoot either with a set shot or a jump shot. At first glance, when comparing the feature set of Intellivision's B-ball offering to Atari's, you'd think that Intellivision's game is the superior.
In fact, I'm not going to argue that NBA Basketball isn't the superior version. However, I will say it was a lot easier to sit down and start having fun with Atari Basketball than it was with this title. Like all Intellivision sports titles, the manual is terrific, (and if you want to win, read that booklet! ) There are four speeds, "play ground", "high school", "college" and "pro". While the learning curve isn't what I would call "steep", it's still a little curvy so we started out in "play ground" mode to get our heads in the game.
"Play ground" mode is pretty damn slow. So slow, in fact, that we started referring to the defending teams player as "zombies" because they put their arms up and sort of shamble around moaning "braaaiiinnss". Actually, we were the ones moaning as we made our way through an entire game on this setting. It felt long enough that by the time we finished the first game on "play ground", we were totally spent and had to go play Fallout 3 for a little while to get our second wind. During the second session (and what I had to promise to my son would be our last session) we cranked it up to "Pro". "Pro" is the speed at which one says "that's more like it!". However, like Hockey, if we hadn't put ourselves through the painful lessons of the "play ground" speeds we would have had a tougher time jumping in as pros.
As an aside: Something I've noticed, which I should have noticed before, is that designers of sports videogames in this era made a conscious choice to have players run out to their positions on the field. This strictly theatrical decision creates an illusion very reminiscent of its real-life counter part. Players don't just appear in place ready for tip-off, they have to run there, while the crowd roars. While completely besides the point, it should be noted that the crowd in NBA Basketball roars with the exact same roar as used in every other Intellivision sports title that has a crowd thus far.
Because team members have been added to this incarnation of basketball, passing is now implemented. For passing purposes, the control pad is a model of a basketball court. When your player has the ball, you can pass the ball to a spot on the court by pressing the corresponding location on your keypad's court. Your on-screen player throws the ball to the spot on the court you've chosen, not to another player. It's up to one of the other players on your team to anticipate the throw and get there when the ball does. Fortunately they are controlled by the computer, so often this works. When it doesn't, the other team will either intercept the pass or your ball will soar out of bounds. True to the presentation of basketball, if it goes out of bounds, the ball must then be thrown in by the opposing team to bring it back into play.
Other offensive features are jump shot and set shot. The basic rule is, the closer you are to the net the better chance your shot will go in. There's even a nice diagram in the manual with the percentage zones. You have a much better chance of making a shot with a set shot, but it's also more likely to be blocked by a player on the other team. Any shot that makes it to the net, but not through it, will rebound with a resounding "boing" and the ball goes to the team that catches it.
As for stealing: we weren't able to steal the ball from each other, but the artificial team members seamed to be able to steal it from us. Maybe we just sucked, but there it is. Oh, and we weren't able to foul each other, either, it just isn't a feature. Since they were able to put penalties in NHL Hockey, I'd been looking forward to fouls in NBA Basketball, but you can't have everything, right? (Where would you keep it?)
The short story of how we feel about this game: It's a well done simulation of basketball and it's very interesting, but for pure fun we still prefer to play Atari's Basketball. This isn't exactly fair or objective, I'm sure if we were true sports game fans, we'd have loved this title for all the aspects of the real game it models. While we respected it, we just don't laugh as often while playing it as we do when playing Atari's version.
Next we'll look at US Ski Team Skiing on the Intellivision.
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