Space Jam was a game I bought about 5 or 6 years ago. It’s a
PS1 game and I played it on my sister’s PS2. However, I first played it I think
in 1998 at my friend Matt’s house; for some strange reason I loved it at the
time, and I wanted to play it every time I went around. It is of course a game
based on the Looney Tunes film of the same name that I don’t think I’ve ever
actually seen. And in hindsight, I realise that it’s not very good at all…
The basic premise of the game is that it is a 3-on-3
basketball game between the Looney Tunes and the Monstars. In a friendly game
you can also have Michael Jordan, who features in the film. The game functions,
but nothing more. The graphics are cartoon-y, as you might expect, but quite
low-res. The sound is a few different samples and some very repetitive
commentary from an announcer. And the game play is what I can only describe as
‘arcade-y.’
To be fair, it is a Looney Tunes game and was never going to
take itself too seriously. And the game was published in 1996, when games were
still being published for the previous generation (SNES/Megadrive,) so maybe I
shouldn’t be expecting too much in terms of the game’s content. Perhaps it
hails from an era where it was perfectly acceptable to have two modes in a
game. Perhaps the fact that you couldn’t save your progress – or have any real
reason to do so – wasn’t so unusual back then. And perhaps the fact that I
don’t actually know anything about Basketball other than how to score means
that I actually prefer the arcade style of play over a simulation (I certainly
had more fun with this than when I tried EA’s NBA game in 2004.) But it still
had to be fun, and knowing a lot more than I did before about video games, I
don’t honestly feel justified in trying to defend it after all this time.
The gameplay itself presents very little challenge. The main
rules for basketball apply, what few of them I know, anyway! I didn’t actually
know what goal-tending was until I’d been caught out by it a few times, and I
still don’t know what rebounds are. You just pick up the ball, run from one
side of the court to the other, and attempt either a two-point or thee-point
shot depending on how high your character’s Shooting skill is. Some characters
can handle three-point shots as long as there’s no-one in the way, but with
some others, you’re better off heading for a slam-dunk. Scoring is pretty easy,
and if the Monstars have the ball, it’s simply a case of hammering the X button
and stealing the ball away from them. Apart from the fact that the graphics
style sometimes makes it hard to see what’s actually going on, there’s really
not a lot to it. The only time I so much as went into a quarter with a lower
score than my opponents was the very first game when I was still working out the
buttons.
The two modes available are ‘Play game,’ which is a single
match, and ‘Intergalactic Tournament.’ The latter is nowhere near as good as it
sounds, but it is the ‘campaign mode’ for the game so this is where I focussed
my attention. It does at least involve some strategy, if not very much: You
have to win five basketball games in a row, which purport to increase in
difficulty but I didn’t notice. And you have to do it without Michael Jordan,
as the main staple of the film doesn’t actually appear in the main part of the
game. Who knew? At the start of the game you pick a Team Captain, and he (or
she!) participates in every game. You want a good player for this, and the best
ones are either Bugs Bunny or the Tasmanian Devil. You then pick two other players,
but – and here’s the strategic part – you can only use them once. So if you use
your best players in the first game, you might find some difficulty in the
later games when you’ve only got your weak characters left. I tried to have a
nice balance of abilities, which consist of Speed, Shooting and Rebounds and
are assessed on a scale of 1 to 3, but I didn’t find it made a massive amount
of difference other than the aforementioned shooting ability. In the end, you
get through all 11 Looney Tunes characters, which for the record are: Bugs
Bunny, the Tasmanian Devil, Lola Bunny, Sylvester, Wile E. Coyote, Foghorn
Leghorn, Elmer Fudd, Yosamite Sam, Daffy Duck, Pepe Le Pew and Porky Pig. When
I won the tournament, the ending sequence was some minor Looney Tunes
characters whose names escape me throwing Bugs Bunny (my team captain) into the
air while he holds the cup, and a zeppelin goes across the sky congratulating
him. The comment specifically relates to Bugs Bunny so I would imagine if I’d
have done it with one of the other characters it might have said something
different, but that’s really the only replay value in this – and let’s be
honest, do you really want to hear what it says about Pepe Le Pew?
In between quarters you can take part in mini-games based
around certain characters that will increase some of your team’s stats if you
succeed. There’s a Micro-Machines style space race, a shootout, and a shooting
gallery. Also, at half time, you can search the locker room to find some
special water bottles (I’m assuming this relates to something that happens in
the film?) and I have never, EVER managed to win this one. It does a lot to
improve the pacing of the game, but the only one that I found makes a
difference is the racing level, which if you win increases your speed
substantially.
Incidentally, I think part of the reason why I found so
little challenge in the game, and remember that I don’t really know anything
about Basketball, was that when I inspected the options menu afterwards, I
found that the game defaults to Easy. I’m not entirely sure why it does this,
given that most games either make you choose before you begin or defaults to
the middle difficulty level. Perhaps if I went through the game again I might
see a bit more of a challenge, but to be honest, it’s taken me sixteen years to
get from one side of the game to the other, so I doubt I can be bothered to go
through it all again.
One good bit about the game is the soundtrack. It’s limited
in content – this is a mid-90s game after all – but I quite like the background
music for Playstation games. I think it’s to do with the fact that CD quality
audio was a pretty new thing to be able to put on console games back then. The
Playstation was the first console to really get it right with CD-based games;
earlier attempts had fallen flat on their faces simply because the technology
wasn’t quite there yet. Later generations did a lot to meld the soundtrack in
with the activities going on in the game, but with a much wider scope available
for the soundtrack in terms of hardware capability, many PS1 developers took it
upon themselves to make some very memorable background music. Space Jam was an
example of this, as some of the tunes – the Space Race and Shootout games in
particular – were actually quite good.
To conclude, I doubt I’ll be playing this one again, and in
the spirit of the No Game New Year challenge, I shall be saying goodbye to it
at some point. Not sure what I’m going to do with it yet as I’m not confident
in selling things on Ebay and I can’t think of a great many people who still
own a machine capable of playing it – but you never know.
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