Play n Trade

JUMP BALL!

Posted by Play N Trade staff writer, 19th Mar 2009

The month of March, if you haven’t already noticed, is Retro Month here at Play N Trade.  We’re celebrating the legacy of video games.  Along that vein, I’m writing about some of the games I grew up with.  This week, I chose something that also relates, very loosely, to what’s known as March Madness. (The NCAA College Basketball Tournament)  I use the term “loosely” because it’s technically a pro-basketball game, but ehhhh.  Double Dribble is a game for the original NES where you could play against the computer or against a friend.  One of my friends had a copy, and it was awesome!  You see, over the years I have become unenthusiastic regarding sports titles.  I see their popularity, and I don’t dislike them.  A lot of people really enjoy playing them.  As do I, on occasion.  However, I don’t feel like spending hours upon hours learning the controls.  It seems that the more buttons we have on a controller, the harder it is to do anything.  Double Dribble had two buttons.  Depending on the situation, those buttons were used to steal, shoot, pass,take a  jump shot, and block.  That’s it.  It was a simpler time.  The game had two major “Wow!” factors.  The first was that the game had digitized speech!  When you turned it on, it announced itself by saying “Duple Driple”, which is about as close as the sound chip could come to playing the speech.  The other cool feature was the zoomed in shots for dunking.  If you were close enough to the basket when you did a jump shot, it would show a slow-mo series of pictures of a grey figure doing a dunk.  At the time, that was high-end graphics for a home console.  (I think the arcade version had a properly colored uniform on the player.)  This kind of sounds like an “I had to walk to school 2 miles uphill both ways in the snow…BAREFOOT!” story, now that I look it over.  I assure you it is just nostalgia.  Now, get off of my lawn!

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