390 - Arch Rivals

Arch Rivals! It's not just basketball, it's a basket brawl! And welcome to Nostalgia, a chronological exploration of... Every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. And I'm Sean. It's a basket brawl, Sean. They coined the term. No one's ever heard that. I'm sure, yeah, no one's ever said that before. I mean, maybe is this like basketball? Is basketball actually like anywhere near the level of cleverness as basket brawl, I ask you?

I guess it really depends on who you ask. And you could do this with everything, right? Base brawl, foot brawl. Where's the VHS copy of foot brawl that's just fights breaking out in football games in the 70s and 80s? Someone has to own that. Yeah, they're probably a bunch of... They're actually just the old school kind of VHS remix. They're just some guy timing the record button on his VCR.

yeah yeah and it's funny that like i feel like that stuff like as clips has made it to youtube but we need that like we need that full program like uploaded right there used to be like a collection of like baseball bloopers right yeah hockey fights right it's like just upload the whole 60 minutes guys like we don't need to break this thing up it was enjoyable back then it's enjoyable now and i guess um you know for arch rivals sake

It's trying to at least separate itself from the other basketball games, of which there are a shocking amount of on the NES, because most of them are already doing like... Okay, this is five on five. This is 2v2. This is street basketball. Like, everybody's already kind of carving out a niche. So Arch Rivals, which is an interesting name. Probably should have just been called Basket Brawl. But...

Arch rivals? Maybe there's a joke about how you shoot at the tip of the arch? No, okay. I don't think it means anything. I think you're right that it is a terrible name.

Yeah, so it's two-on-two basketball, arcade basketball by Midway. First in the arcades in 1989. The NES port comes to us in November of 1990, which means we're almost done with 1990, Sean. Yeah, I'm still kind of counting down the days until I can say I was finally born during this movie. I'm sorry, during this game. This has just been a movie, guys. Everybody's been following the plot of the show, right? But no, we keep...

We keep inching closer, never quite getting there. And while the game is known for making fighting and hitting and slapping legal, I guess it's also, like, it matters a bit because it's the prototype for Midway's, you know, soon-to-be arcade game in 1993, NBA Jam. Charles Barkley, shut up. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

there's jam in the title so i understand how you got confused but it's not charles barkley shut up and jam or charles barkley shut up and jam gaden uh which is everybody should check that out yeah what i was referencing um The yeah, it's very not obvious, but like it's very close to what would become jam. I mean, I think like it's kind of crazy that. This game is basically like NFL Blitz or NHL hits or yada yada. And then they kind of toned it down for NBA Jam.

I would have thought usually it's like these things get more intense as time goes on. But yeah, you can definitely feel the lineage in here. Yeah, that is a good point that...

especially once blitz hit the market that like everyone followed that with hits and slugfest and you know it got way more extreme than you have the street games uh but i feel like even here Uh, it's, uh, you know, like, like the hitting and bumping into the ref and everything. Like it is a, it is an interesting approach at like comedy as a whole, right? Like you're not hitting like street fighter.

hard right it's not like a beat-em-up style thing it's like you know you're just kind of like you're poking this guy and then you got the ball and he's on the ground and then you try to get out through but then the ref's in the way so you bump into him and you fall down right right it's just like it

It's a little silly, but in a way that makes you, again, that comedy thing. It doesn't make you laugh out loud or anything, but I don't know. There was a lot of charm in this one. Absolutely. It's kind of all just a big... pratfall routine and like the i wouldn't call them cut scenes but like they maybe overdo that but like each each time you score a bucket of any kind

you get some weird image and like just the, the way that the ball goes in the net can be in that same like goofball vein. Like it just does the, uh, like really. extravagant bounce outs or a really quick like rotation around the rim and then This precedes jam in how you can break the glass. So all of it is kind of serving that, like, we're not taking this sport all that seriously. Yeah. And there are...

There are four quarters to the game. The NES version defaults to three minutes for each quarter. If you're tied after that, you go to overtime. What is the ideal amount of time? Not even just in basketball games, but just in time in your head of how long a quarter or a half or whatever in any of these games should be. Is it like...

Is three minutes of real time a good amount? Is that too long? Should this be so fast that you can pick up and play a full game in five minutes and then you just run it back? What's your thoughts there? Well, I think it's four minutes. Oh, okay. So I think that's actually pretty good for the pace of this game. It is pretty fast, and there is a lot of stoppages.

Again, it has to cut to a two-second image every time you score. So that time is also kind of getting inflated. You might end up finishing a game in like a half hour of real time. At this rate. So I think it's a pretty good pace. I, you know, when I would play sports games in my youth, would try and go for realism. that would end up being very long games, especially when the default is a five-minute period in hockey or something like that. And that can sometimes expose how...

unbalanced the game is because you end up scoring like 15 goals if you're trying to score a lot, I guess. I don't know. It feels all right. It depends on the game, though, too. I was a huge Wayne Gretzky's 3D hockey fan on the N64. And like, if you were to somehow like set that to be an actual, you know, hockey period length. I don't know what the final score would be. Probably be like 99 to 91. Everybody's always scoring in that game, and it's meant to be fast. But I also feel like in NHL 25,

Like it's not the right call to play a full match there either. Like it's almost never the right call to play the same length. as an actual game is. Even if you're playing MLB, when you play the full nine innings, it should never feel like you committed three hours of your time. That's what I wanted.

I wanted 20-minute periods of hockey, and I wanted it to feel like most games would end like 3-2-4-3, and I could never find the perfect sliders and settings to get there. It would always be like 9-7. Or I would just get blown out seven to nothing. But I was always searching for the perfect simulation. So I was always trying to get there.

Now, we can talk about the mechanics of the game and specifically, I guess, the basketball part because there's the violent part and then there's the basketball part. But rather than... you know, talk about the controls or the characters. I just wanted to start with that the way that the game presents itself, as we said, is very, it's charming, it's silly, it has great presentation between the cutaways.

and the breaks between the quarters. But the actual presentation of the basketball, I don't know if you felt this way, but the court itself is just like, it's too long for 2v2 basketball. I don't know. This feels very... This feels like NBA Jam. Like, it feels like that long.

But for some reason, I don't know if it's the way that it scrolls from one side to the other, but it created a lot of situations where you just don't see the other two, and that creates very... confusing like setups for for both like to take down the opponents and also to like know where like you are in relation to your uh you know if you're playing solo with your ai or with your friend

just knowing where you are on screen. Like, I just felt like if everything was just kind of condensed to fit on like most of one single screen, this game would have been a lot faster. You would have scored a lot more and you would have been able to be more aggressive. With your with your punches and stuff, because a lot of times like I just would hope that my punches would connect with the with the opponent. And instead, the computers mostly were just like.

You know, once the screen scrolled to reveal itself, it was like, oh, I'm left in the dust. Yeah, I think there's a balance here because I think that this is as zoomed out as I'd ever want a basketball game to be. I think if you go any further, then you get...

Like, just really tiny sprites, and the ball would be... We would be complaining about how small the ball is, or... I felt that the characters offscreen were as... like as like difficult to track as in most games that we've played so okay i i thought that it was the right call to because like again you only have to keep track of the two

And I wasn't doing a lot of like blind passes ahead of me. I would usually carry it myself over the half court line. And at that point, then you see everybody. So maybe it was just my, maybe it was just your, uh, your strategy.

That's true. That's true because if you're being too aggressive, which I guess I was trying to do for a large part of the game, like just constantly make sure that my opponent didn't score by stealing the ball from them, maybe it would have been better to just be more protective. uh in in defense and and hope that they miss their shot to be able to pick up the rebound because that was another thing that was a little challenging is once you know if they make an unsuccessful shot

tracking where the ball is for me to pick it up. Maybe I'm just having trouble in 3D space here. I think there's a bug in the game because I didn't get a single rebound on my own. I had to just hope that...

I would be lined up to punch them after the computer got the rebound. There's another interesting decision with the mechanics of the game that it doesn't matter how far away you are from the net. You can take a shot, and the ball must touch the net. There's no such thing as air balls. It won't go in, most likely. It probably has a near 0% chance of going in from beyond half court.

But it's funny that it will just like, it's almost like a glitch to like pass the ball to your side of the court to make sure that the opponent doesn't like quickly. steal it and then yeah take another shot it's definitely a cheese tactic that i was doing when i could tell that they were

Coming at me for like, I just inbounded and they're already pushing up. I'm like, I'm just going to make sure you don't get this or I'm going to delay you by five seconds. They have to drive up the full court again. But yeah, I did notice that a lot of it had more to do with your distance from another. Like it's even outlined. Like there is kind of like a mini instruction booklet in the game itself.

that like how far away you are from an uh your opponent like will determine the pressure on you which has some effect on your accuracy, but I feel like there was more focus on that than there was like, this is from just beyond the three point line to this is at half court. Yeah. Yeah. So like, was it mostly, you know, for me, NBA Jam is mostly a game where like, when I have the ball, I just try and like, you know.

rush it and get a fast break and then just like, you know, do a cool dunk and score and then like hopefully, you know, regain possession. Is this more of a... offensive game than a defensive game or do real players know that it's a balance and you and you have to kind of play both sides Well, it's definitely a more aggressive game because I think in most basketball games, I don't even know what the steel button is really doing. Like between the animation of just like some weird little like.

like spastic move and I'd never know the positioning you're supposed to have during a steal. Um, so I, I was always, very confused when playing defense on these like NES basketball games. Whereas with this, it's a lot simpler. Like you just go up and punch the guy. And usually if you're on the same, like, I guess like Z-axis and facing the right direction, he's going to get punched. And it feels very satisfying when you punch the guy and...

And he does drop the ball. So I wouldn't say that it's like a more defensive game, but I would say it's a much more aggressive game. Like whether you're playing defense or offense, you do have to kind of do what you were doing and just... get up in there, whether you're just going to punch or if you're going to try and tackle them. So tackling, I could never tell when a tackle actually was better than a punch. Maybe if you're chasing them or something. Yeah, maybe if you're like from behind.

Yeah, but I think that you definitely need to get your shots off quick because the computer will punch you. Yeah, definitely more offensive focus.

Yeah, it's funny. The manual mentions in the tips from the coach section, follow the control movements given to you in these instructions.

Then experiment on your own. You might surprise yourself and your opponent with what you come up with. It's all in hitting the right combination of buttons at the right time. That makes it seem that there's like mortal combat level fatalities if you but it but it's not really that right like i never saw any like fun animations if i like the tackle is kind of like a lunge and that's

silly in itself but like i didn't see any like creative animations other than punches and tackles no i i guess there's a little bit of context-based like adjustments like if you completely whiff you'll your tackle you'll just sort of keep rolling which i guess is cool and depending on where you take a shot um you'll either do a jump shot or a not so flagrant um dunk uh but and then sometimes you'll do a really weird like princess peach in mario mario party super mario uh two

where you'll just jump to the rim height and then very slowly get closer to the rim to dunk, which I thought was pretty funny. But I don't think any of those have, like, actual... effects on the game it's just different animations yeah which maybe is what they were implying um in the arcade version uh doing like a a lunge towards the opponent

could trigger an animation where you pull the opponent's shorts down. We needed that. We needed that. We needed more. We just needed more, I guess, like... flavor to the kinds of things because i feel like we were exposed to very early on you find these things out right away and you think like oh the whole game is going to be like this but it kind of like plays its whole hand in two minutes and then it just becomes okay now you know

the systems and everything and what, and kind of like what to avoid. And now you just have to play basketball again. Like eventually with your, even with your friends, it eventually just becomes a game of basketball where you just like, instead of. Instead of someone stealing the ball, they punch the ball. They punch you. It's still the same thing. Sure, but I think you can get a lot out of that. I think that if you can enjoy just a regular basketball game...

then adding a couple weird twists makes it just as, like, I could still play a full game or two with this. I didn't feel bored after learning that that was all I could do. I agree with that.

But is there any meaningful risk-reward to the jumping or the punching as opposed to just letting them take the shot, rebounding, and then trying to take your shot? Do you know what I mean? I think the jump, yeah, I think that there's only risk with the jump because, again, it never worked for me. So I would, near the end of the first game, I just learned to...

Just stand next to them if it looked like they were going to take a shot, because at least that would apply some kind of pressure, like the game calls it, and maybe they'd miss. But then you have to get in there and just start punching so that they don't get the rebound because I can't get rebounds. So there was also some, like, you know, annoyance there.

And yeah, if you do miss a punch, like if they're on the break and you think you can just step in front of them and punch them, if you miss, like you're kind of locked to that position for a split second and they can cover a bit of ground. um if you miss so uh yeah there's definitely risk reward and i this didn't happen in my playthroughs but it does happen in the arcade uh game which i didn't play i only watched uh but like

The fans even get involved by, like, throwing soda cans onto the port. Oh, yeah, that did happen on my game. Okay, great. So it does come to this port. And I think that that is like another thing that is like great to see, like a little bit of randomness. I know people hate like the tripping in Super Smash Brothers Brawl, but like, I don't know here. It's kind of fun. This is supposed to be like.

first and foremost, a party game. So I feel like things happening to chance, again, like sometimes you take the shot and the ball like really... like rides around the rim for a little bit. Like these are all like positives to me in a game that otherwise should be like skill-based. And I think that it's not even as annoying as tripping in Smash Brothers because you do see where on the court this debris is and you can walk around it. It's sort of like...

Like, I also appreciate that the ref isn't just some kind of ghost on the screen like in any other game that has a ref. Like, you will trip over him if you go too close to the ref.

So these are things just to keep in mind and try to adjust your play style around. So it never feels unfair when that happens. And as for the characters, there are eight different players that you can choose from. Uh, they're not like, they're not like fully fleshed out characters in the game. They, they just have, you know, like their names are Tyrone, Vinny, Lewis. Occasionally there's some fun ones. There's Mohawk and yep, he has a Mohawk.

There's a guy named Hammer. Sure. I'm sure you're going to drop the hammer. But one thing that was confusing for me is if you recall, I believe it was last week's episode, we had a game where like... Characters didn't have – no, actually, sorry. It was last week we recorded the Bytes episode for Micro Machines. And if you're not familiar with Bytes, it's another podcast we do.

for our Patreon subscribers only, so consider checking that out on patreon.com slash nostalgia. Anyway, in that game, there were character bios that some of the characters had. uh like hidden stats that like weren't revealed to you in the game this manual does something similar where like it does imply that like they all offer different skills and abilities but then doesn't proceed to like give

It just kind of gives like a little bio where like for Tyrone, when this guy blocks the lane, he really blocks the lane. They put that in quotation marks both times. Not sure why.

No one gets by Tyrone without first receiving an elbow or fist in the face. So I guess I could assume, based on that bio, that he is like... more offensive and like his punches might have like a bigger hitbox or land harder or something but I don't know it doesn't it's not like a dead giveaway like because like they all look Yeah, and they all punch. Yeah, exactly. It's not like he throws an elbow instead that has a larger hip box or something. You have Reggie...

Reggie was an all-stars all-star at one time, but that was 10 years ago. He still has the quote-unquote touch, though, and could probably sink him with his eyes closed, and it sometimes looks like he tries. Well, that just sounds like he's shit. That just sounds like he's washed up dog shit. I guess what I'm getting from that is maybe he's better at three-pointers, but again, I played as a couple different characters, but I didn't notice any qualitative difference in how they played.

Maybe if I played a lot, I would, but that seems to be the sort of half-assed guess that we have anytime we run into this kind of thing. When you shatter the glass on a dunk, which is really cool. The glass stays shattered. Yes. Should it have been fixed so you could break it again? No, I prefer to have the consequence. Yeah, continuity in your basketball game. It would feel stupid if you don't get to see, you know, it would be like if you're like playing Rampage.

And then every time you took down a building, a new one would just sort of appear out of thin air. I want to see my destruction. If there are no rules, what is the ref doing on the court? To enforce the shot clock. Okay, great. So he enforces the shot clock. The one rule, right? The one thing to make sure that you don't just hold the ball for four minutes.

Yeah, which is hard. Which would be a really impressive feat on its own. Yeah, exactly. I did just near the end of the game just see how long I could hold on to it because I guess kind of wanted the game to end. And at a certain point... Like the time left in the quarter does change to 10 seconds left on a shot clock. So it does exist. And while the fans may throw objects onto the court, they're not a particularly like...

rowdy or colorful bunch otherwise. I mean, yeah, they're colorful in the sense that they are red, green, and blue shirts of varying colors.

But, you know, I feel like they could have been doing more. I feel like you could have saw more going on in the background, the interesting things to catch your eye. I think one of my favorite things about... the crowd is that, you know, once again, I have to make it clear that every time you score a basket, there is some really mundane little cut scene that happens, whether it's a cheerleader.

or a coach yelling, or my favorite is just a really strangely composed shot of the crowd that they don't seem all that into it. And it's kind of sparse. I don't know why that was also part of the roster of weird cutscenes, but it is funny. The crowd, it seems like they're really nonplussed to be there. Right, right. Nonplussed. And then there is like the little report in between the quarters and everything. Is that like...

Is that the right kind of flavor? I mean, there's a whole product placement thing that I'm sure we'll get into later on. But like, is that in the right direction or does that like... Bring it too serious with like some stats and stuff. What's your thoughts? Is British Knights a real company? Oh, yeah. British Knights. It's funny because I'd never heard of them either. And so this will.

maybe show our age here but they were a um a sneaker company uh from like i think they started in like 88 so they were just getting big or whatever but british knights uh has like the logo with the bk

And they are from Brooklyn, so, like, but why choose the name British Knights? Like, I would have assumed it was some fancy London sneaker streetwear thing, you know? Yeah. But it was a Brooklyn-based... uh brand and they uh were trying to i guess like get all over the place in terms of advertising and catching people's attention because it wasn't just this nes game that like they paid out of pocket to like get

They were hoping all eyes on this. They actually spent a lot more money by signing hip-hop artists to be their endorsers. They still exist. I didn't know that this was a thing. Yeah, and apparently... They had Cool Moe D, the How You Like Me Now. How you like me now? He was one of their endorsers.

And it was like a huge thing with them and MTV where like that song came on and it was all about with the British Knights brand. And then in 1990, they go even a step further and they get MC Hammer. So like they were definitely aware of this whole like. hip-hop and sneakers thing before like what it is today now it's like a whole you know the the sneaker thing is almost like a collectibles industry no it is and i guess this is how you can tell that i'm not a sneakerhead uh

that I didn't even know that this brand existed. But that's interesting. But okay, to go off of your original question, which is the mid-quarter, or the... The halftime show. I like that kind of stuff. We've talked about present... I don't know about in this game. Usually if it's going for a sim. Like having better presence, have more realistic presentation. I'm usually a fan of, especially because they really only use it during the game to give you like the instruction manual again.

of less like oh this is how you pass this is how you shoot just a reminder you're about to go in the other direction uh in the second half i thought if it was like more comedic or like It would just make fun of the team that was losing or maybe single out a player that threw the most punches or something. That would be cool, but it's not really using the... weird sportscaster trope all that uniquely um but i don't know i don't hate it just it there's a lot of

There's a lot of potential. Yeah, I think it would be odd, though, if a game with this kind of presentation just went to the next quarter. Just like, okay, here's the score. It just shows you a scoreboard or something, and then just goes in like...

It needed a little something to keep up with the whole, like, yeah, go for it. At least it didn't, like, just do the, like, oh, and here's the cheerleaders, like, every other game that we played. But it does do, and here's the cheerleaders a lot throughout the game. yeah that's one of the freaking two point shot things or whatever yeah yeah which is nice that it's not just the ref but like uh it shows you a lot of different visuals as you as you score and um

I think all those things help keep this game fresh. I didn't mean to imply that you discover everything in the game in two minutes. I guess I just meant in terms of what we later get. with the Blitz games and Slugfest and all those. You know, like, those kinds of games, it's like, you could play for hours and hours before you figure out about, like, you could put horse heads on them. You know what I mean? Yeah. There's definitely a lot of... Man, I really just want a new Blitz game.

Would be interesting with all the CTE talk to play a Blitz game, right? I'm pretty sure that that's why they stopped. Yeah, right. Or I guess just, you know, typical image. That's why Blitz the League happened, and we haven't gotten a Blitz the League game in forever, so just have, like, fake teams do this stuff. There we go. There we go. That's always the solution. Yeah. Because they did it here, too. They removed...

any sort of basketball likeliness and everything. And it was also removed in the arcade game. However, the arcade one has an interesting thing where like... not in the menus itself of the game where like you could do it, but apparently there was a way for arcade operators to like choose the colors of the jerseys for the team that the player chooses to play as.

So that they could represent the colors of the city that the machine was based in. So I guess like whatever, you know, like that's, that's neat. I couldn't find an actual like working example of that or how that would work. But again, it's just going to be the colors. So like. Is that even enough? Would you even notice? Would you even be like, you know, because most teams have at least two colors. I think that if maybe, I guess I've only been looking at footage.

of the nes game which i imagine does not look quite as good as the arcade version but if it also says like you know if it's orange and blue and it's and it says new york i'm going to assume that that's the next So I would, I think that if I was here in 1990 playing in our Trivals cabinet and that happened, I would buy it.

All right, there you go. I don't think you can say New York. Not by the cabin. Yeah, yeah. I don't think you can say New York. I think you can only just add the... The dilemma I'm having is, can you even add two colors, right? So to your point...

With the Knicks, right? It's like orange and blue. You would need to know it was Knicks or, you know, I guess like the Celtics, you can get away with just green. You would think that that's the Celtics. So it's not like it's not one shoe fits all, but like. If you can only just do orange, I wouldn't assume if I'm playing the cab in New York City that it's like, yeah, those are my Knicks. Just think it's like, oh, these are just... That's Tyrone. That's Clemson.

Now, what's funny about Tyrone is I've mentioned in the game there is the product placement of the British Knight sneaker. But Tyrone appears outside of this game as a character in the Power Team segments of the Video Power TV show, which I have never heard of. I don't even know what you're talking about, yeah. Right, none of this makes any sense.

But the Video Power TV show, the TV show hosted by Johnny Arcade. Hello. Sean's still not ringing any bells. Johnny Arcade. David Arquette? I have no idea. The cartoon show inside of the show. which was called The Power Team. It was a cartoon adventure featuring Johnny Arcade himself as a cartoon and a team of heroes from different NES games published by the publisher of this game, Acclaim.

So you had Max Force from Nark, Kuros from Wizards and Warriors, Quirk from a tomato from the game of the same name. I don't think we played Quirk. I don't think that any of this, like, there's absolutely no, like, name recognition in any of this. Well, you're not going to believe who I left out, though. Obviously, so Tyrone's in the show, too. So you have Tyrone. a basketball player, Quirk, a tomato, Max Force, a policeman, Kuros, a knight, and get ready for the big reveal, Bigfoot.

That monster truck that we didn't know. It was a character? Yeah, exactly. Bigfoot was a character on the show, which is like another form of product placement because Bigfoot was also, as we learned from Angry Fan Mail, That was a real monster truck that toured the United States.

I think, hold on, I would just like to clarify that I think that we searched mid-episode and confirmed that it was a real monster truck. But we just didn't know that at the beginning of the record. That's just how fast the fan mail gets to us, Sean. But I need a clarification here. Was it the vehicle itself that was a character or was the driver involved? It's the truck.

So it's a car, like it's a cars style sentient vehicle was a character on the show. I'm not saying it talked. I'm saying it's on the show. Okay. Just checking. But that's kind of weird, right? Tyrone? Is that even an established character? I could understand Max Force. We said that that is such a great name on that episode. But, like, Tyrone?

No last name Tyrone from Arch Rivals? No way he's big enough to be in a cartoon with Bigfoot. I would try to think of another analogy, but just by virtue of it being a nondescript... like stand in for any other professional basketball player. I can't think of another like generic character like that, that would make it sound more ridiculous. So, yeah, no, it's strange. Who was the cool kid that we all played as in Micro Machines? Oh, yeah. What was his name? He had a cool name.

Yeah, it was like Spike or something. Not Spike. Spider, Spider. Spider. It would be like if Spider had like a TV show. I don't know. Spider should be on a TV show. And I think Spider looks and bear with me or people. Spider does look like that guy who shows up in that one episode of Rugrats who's really cool at Dee Dee's school. Yeah, he's just a greaser guy on a motorcycle and he gives Tommy a motorcycle helmet. Pretty cool.

There's not much else. I think we covered a lot here. This is a good episode for just two people, 38 minutes. Yeah, it's definitely a good idea to just say that it's a good episode. Yeah, that reinforces it in people's heads. They go like, oh yeah, this actually was a good episode. I was really not enjoying it. Right, exactly. And then they realize, I was enjoying it. Would you believe that this is only Midway's second ever basketball game?

I'm surprised that it's not their first. Interesting. Their first was way back, way, way back in 1974 with the aptly titled TV Basketball. Well, it seems like they definitely took their time to... Learning the ropes, yeah. But right after that, again, we kind of mentioned this in the beginning, but this is not far away from NBA Jam. So they're getting very close to perfecting the formula here. Yeah, and basketball in 1974 anyway, not in real life, but in a video game, it's like, what was that?

I imagine you had to put a little cellophane thing over your TV. Right, to see the court lines. And to be fair, sometimes that's charming, but I don't think I... I'm having a hard enough time with the sports games on the NES. I don't think I ever want to find out. Pong? Great. That's every sports game to me before 1985. Every sports game before 1985 is just Pong.

Okay, so we covered the show. We already said it was a great episode, so nobody can object to that. Are there any other definitive statements you'd like to make? The only definitive statement that I would like to make is that it's time for the Essential Games list.

Well, there's a first time for everything, and by that I mean that's the first time Sean's ever called for the Essential Games list because it's the only way we can end the show, right? So I guess we have to wrap things up here, and I just want to say Arch Rivals. Should have been called Basket Brawl, first and foremost. Great little game here. One of the more fun basketball games that we've had. Not entirely sold on the, like...

experience playing against computers. Not that the computers are like cheap or anything, but just it doesn't feel as fun as playing with another person. Another person's more likely to also just like...

accidentally fuck up as much as you do. And that's half the fun. I really do think that before this is a sports game, it's really a party game. It's not meant to be taken seriously. I enjoyed... almost everything about the game so I don't have too many complaints here but also just isn't full enough and I think that's going to be a problem because like what does it mean to be full enough but like Tecmo Bowl

which we did vote essential, had a lot going on. Granted, it was also just emulating football, right? You would have to pick plays. You don't have to pick plays in basketball, but it just felt more... complex and in depth than what this is offering. I don't like a game where it's like most of the time I'm punching the air and just hoping it connects with my opponent. It is fun when it does connect.

But it's not fun when it's not connecting. It is fun when I shatter the glass by doing an awesome dunk. not as much fun when I don't catch a rebound. The whole game is just kind of like an ebb and flow of like me deciding if I'm having enough fun. So that doesn't sound like fun. But it was fun. But it's not essential. Sean? Yeah, I'd say that in the roster of basketball games that we've played thus far...

I think that this one at least has like the height. I mean, not that you would genuinely or generally like think about like, oh, what's the highest concept basketball game that we've played? This is the highest concept basketball game that we've played, I think. Like we've had ones that are like half court. We've had ones that are five on five. We've had ones that are just literally two specific players playing against each other.

And I think that this is the one that if I had to play an 8-bit basketball game, I would choose to play this one. That's not to say that this is essential, because it's not, but I think that this at least has enough unique qualities that it's the best one that we've played so far.

My historically terrible memory with video games that we played on this show will at least keep this... as something that i will remember maybe the title probably will make it hard like what the hell does arch rivals mean right uh it's still a good game not essential but uh one of the better sports games we've played so far Not that I disagree with your take on the whole, like, you know, best of basketball and everything, but I think, you know.

listeners would most likely add in Double Dribble to that conversation, a game that is beloved by many people who grew up with the NES. But it is also just sort of basketball. No, I agree. I guess I'm saying, like, I'm not siding with them. I'm siding with you. I'm saying, like, I actually do think Arch Rivals is more memorable at the end of the day. Double Dribble is a competent basketball game on the NES.

But I'd very quickly take 3D basketball over double dribble. Yeah, I agree. You know what I mean? I agree. That is exactly what I mean here. Right. Okay, cool. And, you know. Would I say the same for almost any sports game? Yeah, sure. Like, I don't think even the great ones here, RBI baseball, baseball stars, I don't think...

I'm ever picking those over the ones I grew up on. So I think there is always going to be like a nostalgia bias with sports games of, of toleration, you know, what you tolerate, you know what I'm saying? Cause you grew up with them. So it's like, yeah, I know the ins and outs of these. So I understand. That like, yeah, double dribble is way better than that Jordan versus Berg game. Like no one's denying that. But like it doesn't necessarily like deserve.

an essential title more than like arch rivals does and neither one got it. So who really cares? Yeah. Nothing matters. Yeah. Do what you want. Cause it doesn't matter what you do. Thank you. Outro Music