GBA Championship Basketball - Two-on-Two

I was never a basketball player, but in the eighties I didn't care and played everything that could run on a PC. GBA Championship Basketball is exactly the type of game you'd pull out of a diskette drawer on a boring afternoon and expect to play for at least three-quarters of an hour.

It's two-on-two basketball — nothing more, nothing less. You build a team, pick your players, then head to the court against the computer or a friend. The goal is primitive in the best sense: shoot through the basket, defense, exchange the ball. The game is played from the side view, players move on a two-dimensional court like paper figurines. You control one player and the computer or partner takes the side.

Mechanics are simple — movement, jump, shoot, pass. Nothing matrix-like, nothing glitchy. Early nineties would have offered better physics and better AI, but here you get captivating competition with the computer at medium difficulty. It's not hypnotizing and it's not boring. It takes a while to get used to the shooting timing, but then it clicks. Graphics are humble — players without faces, court without details — but everything is readable and you understand what's happening where.

GBA Championship Basketball belongs to the same category as earlier sports games from Accolade or Broderbund — it's not simulation overplay, it's fun. It won't teach you basketball, but it can catch you. It's not such a legend as later Larry Bird or Magic Johnson, but it has its charm. An eight-bit vision of what a sports game should look like when you still weren't playing with graphics cards and your brain had to pull most of the load.

Today you try it in an emulator or browser and have a while of legitimate fun. It's not a game you come back to for decades, but for an hour or two it holds you. Unlike more complex simulations, now you don't have to look in the manual — you press a few keys and play. That's priceless.