January 13, 2012 at 11:48 pm | Posted in iOS Reviews | 4 Comments Tags: Double Dribble, Double Dribble Fast Break, iOS, iPhone, iPhone games, Konami, sports video games, video games
Review Double Dribble. Double Dribble is a 5-on-5 basketball game for the NES, based on the 1986 arcade game of the same name. This is the first basketball game to come to VC, and unfortunately.
From the company that brought you basketball abominations like NBA 2Night and NBA Starting Five, it’s an iOS game that is worse than the original classic for which the game is named after. That’s right, the 25 year-old 1987 NES classic, Double Dribble, is significantly better than the unfinished crap Konami peddled here in Double Dribble Fast Break ($0.99 – iPhone app store). When you look at the game in the app store, it shows the familiar screenshots of the red vs. green teams and those classic zoomed-in shots with guys bouncing dunks off the back rim. This is initially exciting as who wouldn’t want that retro classic on their iOS device?
When you get into the actual game you will be jarred to find your team has purple uniforms…to go with blue arms…and your opponent is the exact same color! It was easier to tell similar looking characters apart in the movie Avatar . This of course leads to random dribbling out-of-bounds as you have no idea who has a loose ball. Now when you go into the options (and you can thankfully change the quarter time and difficulty level), there is a “team color” bar that you can slide. Unfortunately, this change is limited to the uniform color of your guys when they are slow motion dunking or holding up a trophy after you’ve won a game. I’ve heard on the iPad the color of the actual uniforms in-game changes, but how is that programming so challenging that it can’t work for the iPhone 4? The screenshot shown above is from the flash player game that you can play for free on the internet. Thanks, Konami.
Konami spent more time on the large lock icon than coming up with unlockables in the actual game
The controls aren’t bad as the game uses the same two button layout as the original, but the sound is broke, as the game has no volume controls and gets randomly louder at different parts of the game. The zoomed in dunks are still here, but they looked better in 8-bit. There is also the “Fast Break” piece of the game where if you happen to realize you’ve grabbed a rebound and can pass it out to a streaking teammate down the court, your guy gets a little turbo and makes an easy basket (usually a one-handed slam).
After winning your first game, you unlock the asphalt court, and I had a little hope that maybe this was where the real Double Dribble teams were. Nope, we have the same blue-on-blue alien action, and the way every player without the ball stands around and jerks both hands is downright creepy. There is no game progression or different teams to challenge. That asphalt court is it for unlockables in this title (You will thank me for the spoiler alert) and let me remind everyone that this isn’t even a free game. One of the fun pieces of sports iOS games is the price is very minimal. I never complain about a buck spent, but this one gave me serious pause as to if I even wanted the game to remain on my phone once I was done playing. Double Dribble Fast Break can’t live up to any 25 year-old nostalgic hype.