Barnabasket

Basketball games with serious ambitions on 8-bit computers have, in most cases, been disappointing. A prime example is the exasperating Fernando Martín Basket Master, a boring and bad game if ever there was one, which enjoyed widespread popularity solely due to its name (Karnevi's note: I disagree, see the game sheet for more details :-D). Ópera's Golden Basket isn't far behind, although it had the merit of allowing you to control 10 players simultaneously with much more ease than Fernando Martín did with only 2. With a very similar design to the latter, Barna Basket discovers a new type of game: turn-based basketball.

COMMENT

One-on-one basketball games. A foul is called when you go to get the ball. If you shoot from midcourt, you'll make almost every basket... I mentioned "turn-based basketball" because of the game's poor programming. For example, when you shoot from midcourt and press "right" to run for the rebound, you can clearly see that the "graphics engine," if you can call it that, first moves the ball a bit, then the opponent to the left (?) a bit, and then our player to the right the same bit. It's incredibly slow.
The main screen, with the crowd, the court, and everything else, is an 11KB GIF image. It might be interesting to see the MSX GIF-to-SCR converter this game uses. The characters seem entirely programmed in BASIC, as you can clearly see the movement subroutines for each element, although that might not be the case. Anyway, a game you can't miss if you're feeling down.