Collection essentials #171: Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball (SNES)

If you know what this game is, there’s a good chance you’re confused by its inclusion here. “Isn’t this an infamously bad Super Nintendo game??”, you may wonder.

First off, yes, this is a nostalgia pick. It’s a childhood game that at one point my family got for cheap (I don’t remember how). The cartridge in the photo is my childhood copy, even, though the box and manual are not. And it’s true that this game wouldn’t be on here if it weren’t for my nostalgia, but dangit, I swear that this game isn’t as bad as others make it out to be.

Bill Laimbeer, for those who don’t have ‘80s-’90s basketball knowledge, was a real-life NBA player who was most of the way through his career when this game was made. He was a big part of the “Bad Boy” Detroit Pistons teams who played tough and physical basketball and were easy to hate. They were also very talented, winning two championships. Now, this is not at all a realistic basketball sim, and it does not have any other real-life players other than Laimbeer. This is what you’d call a non-traditional sports game, the type that takes advantage of being a video game to mess with the rules and add elements that you’d never see in real life. It’s a type of game I tend to be fond of.

As you may guess from the title, the game takes inspiration from Laimbeer’s rough physical play and imagines a form of basketball without those pesky fouls that prohibit players from attacking each other. When you don’t have the ball, you can perform a dashing attack to temporarily stun a player on the other team. This is something you’ll be doing a lot, because it’s the way to steal the ball when an opposing player has it. The action takes place from a top-down perspective, and you’ll notice various items littered across the ground, some of which are weapons that will home in on and then hit an opponent, some are mines that you want to avoid, some are power-ups, and some are currency that you can spend in between games. The single-player campaign involves playing short seasons which you start out in the game’s lowest-level league, and you have to advance to higher leagues by finishing with one of the best records in your league, while the two lowest-ranked teams fall to the league below (kind of like how pro soccer works in Europe). In between games you can spend money to hire better players to join your team.

As I said, this game has a reputation for being bad, and that’s not without merit. The biggest and most obvious problem is the controls. For some reason they wanted to keep things simple and assign too many actions to one button. Passing and shooting should never be the same button in a basketball video game!! The game is very dull visually, and aside from the two teams being different colors, every player looks totally identical, which means if you hire better players for your team you will have no idea which one is which once you’ve started the action.

When I was a kid, I had no idea that this game had a bad reputation. I played it through to the end and enjoyed it. I got used to how it controls and didn’t have too much trouble beating the computer. It was never one of my favorite games, but I was surprised when I looked the game up on the internet years later and saw people calling it one of the worst Super Nintendo games. Do I recommend you play it in modern times? No, but come on, there are a lot of games that are much worse than this in my opinion. I certainly enjoyed it enough for it to become one of my “nostalgiassentials.”