Basket Boom on the Atari VCS is another game from the prolific Metgan Games who have produced several games that I have reviewed on the channel including Metgan Traffic Mission, A Path to the Princess and one of my favourite Atari VCS games Doodle Taxi.
Basket Boom is a blend of Pong and Basketball and is strangely addictive. It’s a simple game just as many of the classic Atari games were back in the 1970s and 1980s, but with a modern…ish lick of paint.
The game concept and gameplay is very simple. You are presented with a basketball net floating in a pool surrounded by a circle of dirt. Well, actually, I guess it’s less of a pool and more of a pond, or a giant puddle. Whatever it is, it appears to be in the middle of a field with some trees and flowers around it.
You then control a Pong style paddle that rotates around the pond, and from the sky a bunch of basketballs start to drop and hit the edge of the pond. All you have to do is make sure you get your paddle underneath them before they bounce. If they bounce too many times you’ll lose a life. If you manage to connect with a ball, it will automatically bounce and land in the basket in the pond.
In this sense the game is less advanced than something like Pong or Breakout as when you connect your paddle with the ball in those games there was an element of timing and aiming to control where the ball went. In Basket Boom all you have to do is get the paddle underneath the balls and they will automatically be guaranteed to land in the basket. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as although the game would certainly take more skill if you were having to concentrate on not only hitting the balls but aiming them as well, it would make it less of a pickup and play arcade style game.
I do think there is room for that style of play to be used in a sequel or update.
To either side of the pool are two Hud displays with information. To the left is info that tells you what wave you are on in the game, how many balls have been dunked for the current wave and what your score is. On the right is another board that shows you the overall high scores players have got in the game.
The game hasn’t much in ways of customisation or options, although you can choose to play the game with either three lives or three paddles. If you play with lives, you will have one small paddle to play the game with and have three times where you can let a ball bounce enough times to eventually stop bouncing. If you play with three paddles the game becomes a lot easier because you will have three paddles side by side giving you much more room for error. You’re likely to get to a much higher wave, but the downside is you only have one life…in a sense. If you lose a life you now lose a paddle and I promise you that by the time you lose your first paddle it will be because you are being overwhelmed with the amount of basketballs dropping, and the loss of one paddle will quickly be followed by the loss of the other two. This is because you are now even more overwhelmed by the amount of balls with the smaller paddle surface to cope with them all and because you’ll now not be used to the shrinking size of the paddle you have.
The game is advertised as having been made with the Atari VCS Classic controller in mind. I did attempt to play it with the Modern style gamepad, but the paddle moves around the play area so slowly that success would have been almost impossible. By being able to play the game with the rotation possible with the classic controller the game becomes so much easier and more fun to play. It just shows that modern games really could be designed around paddle and dial style controls and work, but almost none will be because only the Atari VCS offers this on a standard controller.
I do think it’s a shame that the game only seems to have one play area which is this pond area surrounded by a few trees and grass with water in the distance. I could imagine that as you get to higher waves that the area would change its look in a similar way to how the games Lumines or The Tetris Effect do. Something like this would make up for the lack of other graphics. Even something like a day and night cycle in the location the game is set in would do a lot to add to the otherwise simple presentation.
I think this game has a lot of potential, but some extra modes and more customisations would take this to the next level. Should you get this game on your Atari VCS? It’s not an essential purchase, but it’s also not expensive, and if you’re looking for games to play with paddle controls this is certainly one of the best on the VCS to make a creative use of the Classic controller.
what would you rate this game?
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