From TV Animation Slam Dunk: I Love Basketball (Saturn)

 I saw some gifs of this game on Bsky a few months ago, and it immediately made its way on my to-play list. You can see from the screenshots that it looks pretty good, but it looks even better in motion! Big, well-drawn sprites that were it not for the concessions made for the purposes of being in a game, could feasibly have been taken straight from animation cels, with animation to match. But, of course: there are many anime tie-ins that look great and don't have much else going for them, so is this game any good?

 

Before answering that question, there are some other things I really need to address. The main one being my lack of interest in basketball, and by extension, my ignorance regarding things like tactics and team positions and so on. Because even though this game is a tie-in to an anime about basketball rather than a real basketball league, it still takes a pretty in-depth approach to the game. Between selecting a team and starting a match, you'll be asked to assign team members to positions, and to select formations for your team to take when they're on the offence and when they're defending. So I can't really speak to how well the game handles these things, beyond saying that it's pretty funny that if you pick Shohoku High School's team, and just go with everyone in default positions, Sakuragi is left on the bench

 

Actually in-game, it all seems to work pretty well. There's a lot of sprite scaling going on as players run towards or away from the camera, which looks great. You use the d-pad for moving around like you'd expect, and the A, B, and C buttons do different things depending on whether or not you've got the ball. With the ball, A dribbles, B passes, and C shoots (I think, but I'm not sure, that shooting relies on some kind of probability equation involving your player's stats, their distance from the basket, and how long they've had the ball with them.). While if you don't have it, A gets in the way of the guy with the ball, B jumps to try and block their shots, and C tries to take the ball off of them. 

 

The camera always looks in one direction, with the court stretching off into the distance, one basket all the way at the back, one right at the front. It keeps things simple, and it always being at the same angle allows for the aforementioned detailed, well-animated sprites. I think there might have been an arcade basketball game that used a similar set up, but I'm not sure about that. It works, and like I keep mentioning: it looks great! The menus look a little less great, but in a very charming, very nineties kind of way: lots of multi-coloured WordArt on display, for example.

 

From TV Animation Slam Dunk: I Love BasketBall is a pretty decent little game. I can't play it well at all, and haven't won a single match yet, but I've come close a few times! One thing I should also mention is that not only does it allow you to play matches with twenty minute long halves, but if you want to play story mode, you don't get a choice, and you'll have to play these insanely long matches, presumably racking up massive scores over time, too. For as much as I've praised the game, I haven't been able to get through even half of one of these real time matches. But there is a versus CPU mode (and a two player versus mode, of course) that lets you play with more reasonable settings. I think it's at least worth giving a try if you're curious, or if like any other normal person with good taste, you love sprite scaling.

Building Crush! (Playstation)

 This is a hard post to write, and one I really hoped I wouldn't have to. The reason it's a hard post to write is because Building Crush! is an awful game, and everytime I loaded it up, I dreaded actually playing it. The reason I hoped that I wouldn't have to write it is because I'd originally planned to write about a differrent Playstation game, Buckle Up. Buckle Up is a pretty interesting semi-open world driving game that I think is kind of inspired by Dukes of Hazzard? But unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to get past the first mission, so here's Building Crush! instead.

 

Building Crush! is a colour-matching puzzle game themed around the idea of competitive building demolition (or crushing, if you will). You and your opponent each stand on a window-washer's platform in front of a tall building. The buildings are made of cubes in various colours, most with windows on them. The windows are constantly opening and closing, and you have to throw bombs into them when they're open, then detonate them. When you destroy a cube in this way, any cubes touching it that are the same colour will also explode. Furthermore, the cubes above will fall down, and if they do so in a manner that creates a formation of four or more touching cubes of the same colour, those formations will then explode, creating the traditional competitive puzzle game chain reactions. 

 

So far it doesn't sound too bad, right? The main problem is that the game is incredibly slow. Moving around is slow and throwing the bombs is slow (and made worse when a window closes and your bomb just falls down uselessly). The only way to win a round is to destroy every last cube of which your building is composed, so rounds take several long minutes to finish, and each stage is a best-of-three match. Making things worse is that some cubes don't have windows, and can only be destroy either by linking them to same-coloured ones that do, or by repeatedly (and slowly) hitting them with many bombs until they eventually crack and disappear. And no matter how well you plan things, you'll always end up with at least one of these at the end of a round.

 

Another complication comes in the form of random objects that sometimes fall down from the 'bove. If they hit you, they actually slow things down in two ways! First, you're momentarily stunned. Then, a witch will fly onscreen and change one of the windowed cubes onscreen into an unwindowed cube. It's all a shame, as I'm sure the basic concept of the game could have been fun. It needed to be a lot faster, louder and more manic, and maybe have a lot bigger explosions and maybe some numbers flying around the place when you score big chains. As it is, it really feels like the developers were anxious about possibly over-stimulating players or something, like they might have had a good idea once, but stripped away all the fun and excitement, chasing some theoretical puzzle game player that won't play anything that isn't sedate. That's all conjecture on my part, of course. I doubt there's ever been or will ever be a developer interview related to a low budget Japan-only console-exclusive puzzle game from 1996.

 

Obviously, I don't recommend Building Crush! That exclamation mark at the end of its name is the most exciting thing about it. I guess it's also worth mentioning that your character has a little animated facepic thing that appears (and blocks your view) when you're doing well, and you actually make the face using a little photofit-type thing before you play. That's mildly impressive. Also one of the stage backgrounds is a photo of some people (presumably the developers) having a nice time in a nightclub, which is the kind of thing you don't really see in commercial videogames anymore.