An early
NES sports title. This game was
hilarious, and amazingly
fun. I don't play many sports titles so I can't really compare
double dribble to anything. You can pass, steal and shoot. What else could you want? What makes this game so much fun though are the many
bizarre features and
errors.
The teams featured black and white players but anytime a player had the ball, or a person controlled that player, they turned white. This happened because the player you have control over would rapidly blink, which had the effect of making them white.
The player's shoes squeaked constantly. Basically everytime they turned around. Also, when you jumped you still had complete control over the person. You could jump, move forward and then backwards, and then shoot and make the shot. You could also jump and simply turn back and forth. The most disturbing aspect of this was that your shoes still squeaked even though you were in the air! You could get knocked down onto your back and keep on switching the direction of your guy. And, of course, the shoes would still squeak. For some reason the ball made a noise when it went through the air with a nice doppler effect sound.
One cool thing in the game was that if you released the ball near the goal it would do this neat slam dunk cutscene that was pretty advanced for the NES. One time I was playing and I went to slam it. The computer managed to grab the ball out of my hand just as I reached the hoop. The cutscene appeared anyway and I scored. It went back to the game and the computer guy dribbled away with the ball as if he had stolen it.
All the players dribbled all the time. They always had one hand out going up and down regardless of whether they had the ball or not. By moving around in circles with the ball you could get almost everyone else to do the same creating a sort of horrific dribbling ballet.
The floor was done at a 3/4 isometric view like most sports games but the player's didn't adhere to this. They moved about as if it were a 2D picture. This meant they didn't get smaller or move slower as they moved to the back of the screen. This led to the ability of slam dunking from outside the 3-point line. You could also jump out of bounds, float back in bounds and then slam it.
If a player swished the ball the net would bounce up and back down, except sometimes it got stuck up. It would stay that way until it got knocked back down. Sometimes the ball simply disappeared. This was especially amusing since everyone looked like they were dribbling anyway. Sometimes the ball would float above the head of the player who had it. Instead of stuffing you when you shot, the opponent usually just grabbed the ball from you. Sometimes when this happened the ball would fly off the screen and then fly back.
Despite all this, the game was amazingly fun to play against the computer or another person. In fact, I think the errors made it more interesting. The emulated version of the game has all the same errors and stuff so you can try it out by using an Nesticle.