Original Release: Master System, 1989, Sega
An odd and simplistic monster-themed basketball game from Sega.
Basketball Nightmare (Master System, Sega, 1989)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
This is actually not a bad concept and could have been a cool game with some tweaking. Some team of high school kids gets pulled into another dimension or lost in some primeval forest or something, and has to play a series of monster teams in basketball to escape. A few things would have made it a lot better, though.
First, the tension of being eaten or gruesomely killed if they lose. Instead the monsters look like cutesy Teen Wolf and such, and your team is just a series of generic redhead clones. There’s just no horror edge to the game whatsoever. Get experimental, guys!
Second, the gameplay needs to not be a steaming pile of shit. On both offense and defense the CPU just sort of mills about randomly. They don’t try to get into open passing lanes and they certainly don’t make any effort to play effective defense. You also can’t seem to steal or try to block shots, so each match degenerates into letting each other toodle down the length of the court and hoping for a missed dunk. You can’t seem to pass forward either, or it’s really hard/unintuitive to select who you want to pass to. And you can’t recruit/play as the other teams? They seem to have no special abilities anyway. Opportunity wasted there.
Third, the annoying repetitive music that loops like every fifteen seconds has to go. The game also thinks it is hot shit for having one close-up dunk animation per team, in an apparent copy of Double Dribble. Sure, it looks pretty good for an 8-bit system, but it’s the exact same thing every time. You certainly ain’t no Tecmo Super Bowl, Basketball Nightmare. Step your game up bud.
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