Oh god dammit Jaleco, I was just saying so many nice things about you. You’re going to make me look like a fool and I do that enough already! The site calls itself wack for chrissake – you’re damaging what little credibility I’ve left for myself!
In Your Face is a waste of 41 kilobytes. This is the barest of bones, devoid of even marrow to sustain you. It’s kind of a riff on Jordan vs Bird, which is already not a great starting point. Don’t worry though, the GB port of that mess didn’t show up for another two years and it’s somehow worse!
Anyway, IYF. It’s shooting contest ball, meaning you get one hoop and need to run to half court a lot. The modes on offer are 1v1, 2v2, and Off. You can futz with the settings – time, score, duration, etc. That last one should be set as short as possible.
Once you actually hit the court the game start emitting a horrible set of bloops that legitimately had me wondering if my speaker was ok for a moment. It sounds…wet? Waterlogged, somehow? I’ve listened to this game’s music with and without headphones now and there’s just something viscerally unpleasant about it. It makes me tense my neck up whenever it kicks on and I mildly regret looking it up one last time for the purposes of this writeup.
Then you play it and everything goes off the rails. The game consists of getting possession of the ball via a semi-reliable steal, sprinting up to the hoop, and triggering the canned dunk animation. Taking longer shots is a good way to lose. The only chance your opponent has of stopping a layup is getting there first, and I legitimately could not tell you what does or doesn’t qualify for a block. I think you need to jump first? Maybe? Normally I’d play a few more times to figure that kind of thing out, but I’m not going to do that for two reasons:
- I won my first game against the CPU
- this game sucks
What Jaleco has demonstrated here is that if you strip baseball down to its essence you end up with a relatively simple, but enjoyable game. Distilling basketball in a similar manner could work, but not when you take all but 2-4 of the players with it. Get this mess out of my face and onto the ugly part of the list.
Wack Game Boy Zone 