#477: Tecmo Super NBA Basketball (1993, SNES)

Timing can be a tremendous influence on ones impressions of a videogame. Take for instance the competing early-gen SNES basketball games Tecmo Super NBA Basketball and NBA Showdown (by Tecmo and EA Sports, respectively). They are, on the margins, very similar - sporting the same perspective, the same general control schemes, and similar feature sets. One of these I received as a youth, spent significant time playing, and genuinely became very attached to, the other I bought used on a whim a couple years ago and was largely unimpressed by it for the short duration I spent playing it (before filing it away in my collection). I get the feeling - despite the fact that my opinion spouting the superiority of one to the other being very much genuine - that they could just as easy of swapped positions.

To be clear here, NBA Showdown was the title I spent hours playing in my youth (going to far as to get about 20 games into a season - playing 12 minute quarters), while Tecmo Super NBA Basketball is the one I got on a whim and haven't spent much time playing. Is NBA Showdown clearly better? I feel pretty strongly that it is, but I also have a very good feeling that this opinion comes largely from their roles in my gaming lifetime.

Even examining my reasons doesn't really help me - I like NBA Showdown's slower and more deliberate pace - or did playing NBA Showdown so much as a child train me to enjoy slower paced basketball? If NBA Jam had been my first basketball game, would I now find all basketball sims unbearable? (I'm kidding here, NBA Jam flat sucks) I also find NBA Showdown's menus straightforward and easy to navigate while Tecmo Super NBA Basketball's feel obtuse and outdated - despite being set up nigh-identical to Tecmo's other dozens of sports games I've played extensively. Is this because I'm used to NBA Showdown, or is it that, by 1993, the Tecmo method genuinely was obtuse and outdated? They did, after all, overhaul things for Tecmo Super Bowls 2 and 3 on the SNES.

There are still issues with it that I likely would have found even then - it, like Tecmo's other forays into the 16-bit sports world, felt too stagnant. Little is changed from Tecmo NBA Basketball for the NES - even in controls, despite having 4 more buttons to use (x,y,l,r) - forgivable if perhaps a SNES launch title, but unforgivable coming out in 1993. Granted, the NES Tecmo Basketball I managed to like quite a bit - but I give a much greater benefit of the doubt to 8-bit basketball games (of which there are few that are even passable) than I do to 16-bit basketball games (of which there are several that are excellent, specifically the NBA Live series). Also, things like Tecmo's patented cut-scenes went from charming, to surprisingly creepy (see the embedded video). Tecmo was also late to the party on many of the basic customization features that EA Sports had made standard by then, like, say, trades and customizable rosters.



I still get the feeling that if we had met in a different time, Tecmo Super NBA Basketball could have been really good friends but that I had become too set in my ways when we finally met for me to give it a proper chance.

Tecmo Super NBA Basketball
Publisher: Tecmo
Developer: Tecmo
Released: 1993
Obtained: October 2007 (Used)

6.0/10