Hello, I'm the Nostalgic Gamer. I remember it so you don't have to. Heh, get the reference? If you don't then click on this: The Nostalgic Critic. The Nostalgic Critic is a guy with glasses that remembers old movies (most of them bad, some of them the epitome of evil because of the direction of one Uwe Boll) and does it in moderately lengthy videos, similar to Yahtzee. You don't know Yahtzee either? Fuck... okay, go here then, dumbass: Zero Punctuation. Differences lie in media outlet and time of the stuff reviewed. Me, I'm a fan of both, so I'm going to combine elements of both (which I kind of already do) and do it from a textual standpoint, inserting videos and pictures throughout to make a point. Sound good? Fantastic. That's the proper format for all preceding posts.

You know, I don't usually do sports. I'm not talking about football or basketball, I love those; I'm talking about football or basketball video games. Why? For that very reason above: if I really want to play football or basketball I can do it myself. On the occasions I DO play sports video games they either come with the system (recalling my Dreamcast) or they're so over-the-top that you couldn't (or shouldn't) do them in life (Blitz: The League). But this is actually a relatively recent phenomena in me, considering I only really started this in the early part of the new millennium. Before that I was playing NBA Live and Madden like everyone else.

The Madden thing... well, if I talked about that already then I talked about it already, I don't like EA Sports for a reason. NBA Live 96 was my favorite basketball game of all time, and I'm not just saying that because it was one of the first I played. I liked it because it was oddly unbalanced. Every time I used the Raptors I could never miss a three pointer. Believe me, I tried, but I never missed one. So I cheated, in a sense, and beat my friends mercilessly. Then, I got another basketball game.

Back in a time when games were 16 bit - and consequently the world made sense - there was a basketball player named Charles Barkley, the latest retired ball player to catch the political bug, that dominated the game. He was the face of the new basketball game known as "Shut Up and Jam", a 2-on-2 street tournament style game featuring a host of people with stats and funky names, exotic locales such as Watts and Brooklyn, and of course Sir Charles, the king of the rebound. There was basic stereotypical hip hop loops for music, Charles telling you to get the damn ball if it was just on the ground, and half of the blocked shots were goaltending violations. I loved it.

Let me tell you something: Barkley Shut Up and Jam had something most basketball games of the time didn't have: stunning realism combined with stunning unrealism. Do you play streetball? I did. There were no fouls or goaltending, no time limits, just playing the damn game until mama called you back for dinner. When you got hit there was nothing pretty about it; you hit the ground hard and you were lying there until you moved. You try to dunk you will get knocked the fuck down if you're a presumptuous little dipshit. You don't fly around the country to play; you go in the backyard or that court down the street. You have funny ass names and you wear your hat backwards. That's streetball. Until NBA Street came along (kinda...) this kind of beautiful game was one in a million, and I still play it today, yes, I still play it, and you know why? Because its fun, like Mystical Ninja (you gotta have an acquired taste for that one...), and until there's another game of that caliber created I give the big middle finger to all other streetball games!

Granted... you may be thinking, "DiZ, you ill informed aphrodisiac, wasn't there a sequel to that game?" To you I respond with this question: you should be ashamed of yourself. We will NOT discuss that awful ass game here... not for many days... DiZ, out!