Dunk Kid's (Game Gear)

The strangeness with Dunk Kid's doesn't actually start with the superfluous apostrophe on the title screen: before you even get to there, there's a splash screen featuring the logo of ASBA, the All-Japan Street Basketball Association. What's strange about ASBA? Well, not only do they seem to not exist anymore, but the only reference I can find to them online is in relation to this game, which makes me wonder if they ever existed at all. None of the teams in the game have names besides their home city/country/state/continent, either, which makes ASBA's existence all the more questionable.

But let's not allow possibly-fictional governing bodies skew our opinions of this game, that simply wouldn't be fair, would it? Especially since it's a pretty good game, after all. Like Jammit, it's a basketball game in which both sides are trying to score in the same basket. Unlike Jammit, it doesn't make many embarassing pretensions towards being "tough", nor does it have a buffet of weird variant rules.

In Dunk Kid's, there's a time limit, and whichever team has the most points at the end of it is the winner, and that's that. Baskets score one point when they're put in close to the basket, and two points from far away. If you get one in from directly beneath the basket, this sometimes triggers one of a few special dunk animations, which look cool, but still only score one point.

It's a pretty fun, simple sports game that doesn't make a quixotic attempt at squeezing a psuedo-realistic "simulation" out of an 8-bit console. But what it does squeeze out is some surprisingly great presentation! Each team has their own slightly stereotypical stage, for example, and while you might expect an 8-bit sports game to have one player sprite that's cloned and recoloured many times for every player on every team, there's actually four player sprites that are copied over the game's eight teams! Not only that, but the devs have even got a nice little bit of diversity out of those four sprites: there's a bunch of different skin colours spread across the teams, and one of the sprites (or, if you like, two of the teams) is a girl! Even in 2020, there's not many games where you can play as a black girl, but this little-known Japan-only handheld sports title is one of them!

There's really only one big problem Dunk Kid's has, and to be honest, it's not even that big a problem. I'm sure you remember how in Cyber Dodge, the teams' stats were based on the order in which you face them in the single player campaign. Well, the same is done here, so if you play a single match (or if you somehow get two Game Gears, a link cable and two copies of the game to play versus mode), the only viable teams to pick are Russia, China, and Hawaii. In campaign mode, only the teams representing Japanese cities are playable, making this a Japanese game where all the Japanese player options are the weakest. How odd!

Anyway, yes, Dunk Kid's is a very fun game that I definitely recommend to people who aren't the types to turn their noses up at ancient sports games. It's just a shame it's on a system that requires such faff to set up a two-player game.

Other Stuff Monthly #15

So, back in the Tokyopop-led English-translated manga boom of the early 2000s, one of the titles that really caught my eye and my imagination was actually a Korean comic, Ragnarok, by Lee Myung-Jin. It's a fantasy comic with amazing art, and it's probably less well-known than its spin-offs: the MMORPG Ragnarok Online, and the TV anime Ragnarok The Animation (which was based on the MMORPG, rather than the comic, but I'll return to that subject later).

Re-reading it as an adult, it definitely feels like a case of style over substance. Luckily, the style is good enough for that not to really matter. The art is consistently excellent, and though most of the comic is made of characters either firing big magic attacks at each other, or dramatically delivering exposition to ach other, it all looks so good that you barely even notice. Me and my friends definitely didn't back then, at least. The look of the world is a very videogamey mix of European and Asian fantasy aesthetics, with a slight bit of sci-fi flavour on the weapons and armour, which all appear to be made of some kind of very smooth, curved, futuristic materials.

Teenage me was very disappointed, of course, when after the tenth volume, Ragnarok just seemed to stop coming out. I even e-mailed Tokyopop! They actually did reply, and even more interestingly, they told me the real reason as to why volume eleven wasn't out yet: the creator was making so much money from Ragnarok Online that he was focussing on that instead of his comic. How disappointing! There was even an interview with him in the back of the fourth volume, in which he describes his plans for Ragnarok: a 40-50 volume saga with seven story arcs! Tokyopop were clearly behind the series, too: I remember it being heavily promoted by them at the time, and they also added an unusual extra to the volumes themselves: psuedo-Dungeons and Dragons stats for all the main characters! (Well, they said the stats wee just "inspired by the manga" and not part of any real RPG system. But they look closest to DnD, at least.)

More disappointment came when the anime came out, and it was based on the MMORPG rather than the comic itself. Even now, I'm not interested in online games, but back then, I didn't even have a computer or internet connection at home! Not only that, but it really did feel like the last nail in the coffin of the original Ragnarok story and its characters. Well over a decade later, and I'm pretty sure Ragnorok Online is long dead by now, too, and I haven't heard anything about the comic coming back, either. RIP Ragnarok!