Game review by William Smith
I don’t know much about basketball. I had to look up the word “rebound” after angry fourth-grade parents screamed it at me during my first and only basketball try-out.
Determined to shield myself from further public humiliation, I worked out the rules of the sport through video games. Classics like “Lakers versus Celtics and the NBA Playoffs” and “NBA Jam” proved to be much more competent teachers.
Much like Spike Lee’s “Hoop Dreams,” the two-on-two formula of “NBA Jam” held a universal appeal that reached beyond the sports. If you’re a 1990s kid, you likely played it.
But I never heard my friends mention “Slam City with Scottie Pippen.” Probably because they had never heard of it.
A Sega CD game released toward the end of the ill-fated console’s lifespan, “Slam City” consists entirely of movie footage — a common gimmick for CD-Rom games of the era. The “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure”-type genre suffered a pitiful death at the hands of disinterested gamers and critics, but I’ll always be a fan.
“Slam City” is one of the few games of the genre I missed entirely, until last week.
The action takes place from a first-person-perspective, via a camera that roves across a basketball half-court as though the player is dribbling. A digitized representation of the player fills the bottom of the screen, which you must position correctly to shoot the ball, steal the ball, etc.
Your opponents (i.e., actors who didn’t make it to TV) are constantly in your face, talking trash through offense and defense.
Every game consists of hundreds of strung-together video clips that change according to the player’s actions. Stealing the ball counts as an automatic slam dunk, treating you to a ludicrously overblown video clip of your character flipping through the air as he deposits the ball.
It’s so fun, so 90s, that I was able to overlook the overbearing difficulty with a generous amount of modern cheating.
There’s often no way to tell when you can steal the ball, when you can’t, or when you shouldn’t. The free-flowing action devolves into an overly restrictive process of trial-and-error and memorization. Typically, the game ends in a video clip of the opposing player slamming the ball back into your face.
Despite the lost opportunity at the time of its release, “Slam City with Scottie Pippen” has become a cult classic. It's a cultural oddity that should have spawned more manageable sequels.
Given Pippen’s renewed relevance in “The Last Dance” ESPN documentary series, maybe he would be up for a sequel.
Every good game needs an even better bad guy, even basketball games.