Version| Date purchased | Price paid
| Basketball | Sept. 24, 2007 | $1.99
| Atari Greatest Hits: Volume 1 | Sept. 18, 2012 | $12.01
| |
This is one of, if not THE, first game I ever played.
It has 2 modes:
Mode 1 is 2-player
Mode 2 is 1-player, using the Right Controller.
The real draw for this game is 2-players, but just about any game is great in multiplayer. Playing against the computer is pretty tough. Even though it is pretty easy to score, it's hard to get any separation -- both from the actual player and on the scoreboard. I stopped playing new basketball games in the late '90s in large part because the computer is pretty much a joke as competition. Not here. This is probably the toughest computer opponent I've ever played against in a basketball game.
For a basketball game, it's about as simple as can be. Just 4 minutes of full-court, one-on-one. No teams, no fouls, no infractions, no 3-point shot (the NBA started using the 3-point shot in 1979, the NCAA in 1980, and FIBA in 1984, so no major basketball league was using it in 1978 (the ABA (which did use it) merged with the NBA in 1976), when this game was released). Yeah, the basketball is a square. Sure, there's no net. The players look like stick figures -- big deal, so does Pitfall Harry. Other than the out of bounds line, there are no floor markings -- do you care about any of those when you're playing out on the playground?
But it's still fun to play, especially against another person, which is really all that matters. Plus, it made a cameo in one of the greatest comedy films of all time -- Airplane! (1980).
Dates played: July 17, 2022
Playtime: 32m
Date reviewed: July 17, 2022
Date posted: Feb. 24, 2023
Rating: 7/10
I played it on cart back in 2014 and wasn't able to figure out how to dominate the CPU. After a few games this time around, I did. I ended up consistently beating the CPU by around 30 points on all difficulty combinations. I'm keeping my rating the same as what I gave it in 2014, as I know from experience how good 2-player is.
