Press start to pay respects.
The Retro Roulette wheel is truly random, so you can imagine my reaction when it landed on NBA Courtside, a game prominently featuring the recently deceased basketball guy Kobe Bryant. Kobe was in just 19 years old and in his second NBA season when this game was released – this is still, I think, the sports game with the youngest cover athlete. Unlike most other sports games that are released by big, third-party publishers like EA and 2K, this one was a first party release by Nintendo.
While his skills at doing basketball are fairly unquestionable, Kobe’s legacy varies a bit depending on who you ask. Personally, I kinda couldn’t stand the guy, in large part because of how consistently he beat my team, the Minnesota Timberwolves. You can imagine my frustration when the first thing I saw upon starting the game was this:
Ugh.
As for the game itself, it’s a “simulation” style game (as opposed to the NBA Jam-esque “arcade” style), and it’s pretty bare bones. You can play a “pre-season” (aka just one game), start a single-season campaign, or an NBA Playoff run. There are a few general settings that can mostly be turned on and off, but there aren’t a lot of “sliders” that you can tune to your exact liking. Courtside just wants you to like it for what it is, I guess.
While Courtside has pretty much the full 1997 NBA rosters, there are a couple of notable players missing – Michael Jordan (due to licensing agreements), and Latrell Sprewell (because he did this). The former of those “appears” in the game like this:
Who could it be?! Meanwhile, I’m starting to remember just how weak the Timberwolves were at center for basically my entire youth.
The gameplay is all fairly straight forward and gives you play-calling and other coaching options, and by and large it looks and plays like most basketball games do. One exception to this is that it will sometimes (rather unpredictably) cut to an “under the basket” camera to highlight action that’s happening there. This camera is ostensibly mostly designed to show off a cool dunk, but it’ll occasionally zoom in to show a spectacular failure, such as getting wrecked by Eric Montross:
While games in Courtside feel enough like basketball, some of the game’s controls felt a bit cumbersome. There’s a button to switch on defense to the player closest to the ball (a very, very important feature to have in basketball sims), but it often felt like it didn’t work as quickly or as accurately as I would’ve liked. I also occasionally ran into issues with the game’s AI – when a computer-controlled player would get the ball with a clear path to the basket, he often wouldn’t just go in for a dunk. Instead, he’d put his back to the hoop, post up against nothing in particular, and then either eventually dunk or miss a layup. Perhaps high difficulty settings make this less common, but even at a low level it’s really weird.
Especially as a first effort, NBA Courtside is a passable (heh) basketball title, albeit one without a ton of extra bells and whistles. It received one sequel on the N64 and another on the GameCube (I played that one a lot when it was new – it’s fun). If you’re nostalgic for the 1997-98 basketball season for whatever reason, though, this is an alright way to relive it. Go finish that second Bulls three-peat, get revenge on the Bulls as the Jazz, draft Chauncey Billups, trade everyone to the Mavericks, whatever floats your boat.
Next week’s game is a classic, in at least one sense of the word. In fact, it’s probably one of the most well-known unlicensed games in history. See you then!