A punch-drunk Super NES retrospective
Bad boys! Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?
This week's Super NES Works tackles two sports-themed games associated with big sports stars of the era. The better of these two games, Super Off-Road, actually lost its celebrity endorsement somewhere between the arcade and Super NES... but it didn't really matter, because the game turned out brilliantly anyway.
The other game, on the other hand, is a strange relic of a very specific time in history. Hudson took a fantasy futuristic take on basketball, one with a heavy emphasis on one-button combat mechanics, and slapped the name of Detroit Pistons roundball star Bill Laimbeer on it. The idea was that Laimbeer played a violent and frankly dirty form of basketball, so he would slot right into this combat-centric take on the sport. I guess that's true, but mostly it turns Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball into a kitschy novelty. Then again, that's more than most 30-year-old sports games can hope for, so who's to say Hudson's weird choice was wrong?
Anyway, I would never recommend Combat Basketball to another human being, but Super Off-Road is alarmingly good even now. Track down a copy for yourself sometime!
