289 · Magic Johnson's Fast Break

• Basketball the way the Pros play
• NES Longplay
• Manual
• Magic Johnson
• In a fast break, a team attempts to move the ball up court and into scoring position as quickly as possible, so that the defense is outnumbered and does not have time to set up.
• The Double Dribble approach
  • two-on-two action rather than NBAl five-on-five
• Graphics
  • No animation for Steal
• Magic Johnsons floating head between shots
• High Scores are “Salary”
• Choose from five skill levels - Rookie to Professional.
• Each game lasts four three-minute, real-life quarters.
• Four Players
• Sequels and Spinoffs
• EGL
• Next week - Magician
• NEStalgia Byte - Fire Emblem

Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.

00:00 Magic Johnson's Fast Break. Basketball, the way the pros play.

00:21 And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sean. And I'm Joe. Magic Johnson. Oh, oh, oh boy. What do you know about Magic Johnson? He's a very, very good basketball player. For which team? Most of- The Lakers, right? Yeah, but it's just really, I'm just doing like a pop quiz trivia thing. I'm not asking- it's not like I didn't know these things. Right, right. It's okay if you were. See, I actually know very- I know very little about basketball myself, but I- the most information I know about Magic Johnson is from a 30 for 30 I watched about him and Larry Bird. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a thing.

01:06 Well, him and, you know, Larry Bird did not star in a video game together. Larry Bird and Michael Jordan starred in a video game. Another MJ. Isn't that interesting? We had MJ Magic Johnson and nobody was calling him MJ because he had a great nickname in Magic, but then we have Michael Jordan MJ and people were fine calling him MJ even though we had Michael Jackson who was also MJ. So there really is a MJ crisis going on right now. Specifically in this time, not right now actually, not in 2023. What about Mary Jane? People do call her MJ as well.

01:42 She had been around- Plays a lot of basketball. Yeah, she had been around since the 60s though, so if anything she actually has like the rights to MJ. We don't know she didn't play basketball. I said she plays a lot of basketball. I assumed automatically that you were talking about Mary Jane Watson too. That is exactly what I was talking about. Yeah, I know, but I said you could have been talking about any Mary Jane. Like, you know, Mary Jane as a name has been around even longer than the 60s.

02:06 Oh, like marijuana? Well, that's true too. You know, MJ is also for marijuana. And I wonder, you know, if that was- Sorry, this is no longer a basketball podcast and it never was really. It was an NES podcast. But this is now a Mary Jane podcast because I do wonder, Sean, you know, Spider-Man came out at a time where there was the code, you know, the comic code authority that basically was like, no more showing naked women and no more bondage and stuff like that. No more horror and no more cults and wow, what other fun things can we get rid of?

02:38 And the guys at Marvel and DC really hated that. They really hated the comic codes authority. And so now I'm wondering if Stan Lee named her Mary Jane as a like reference to, you know, marijuana. See, I'm wondering the opposite. I wonder if the slang term Mary Jane for marijuana came about because of the popularity of a woman named Mary Jane being called MJ. And they're like, oh, MJ, Mary Jane, marijuana, MJ. And then they're like, oh, so maybe it's like that's where the slang came from. Really? What a shame. Mary Jane.

03:16 I don't know where I'm going with this. Never mind. Basketball. Let's just start. You guys know what a fast break is? Because it's not just like it's a Reese's. Yeah, it is. It is definitely. This isn't Magic Johnson's candy making game. It's the, you know, it's the transition. It's like a fast transition from one side to the other. You're trying to, you're sort of breaking the defense. There's some players behind you. So you can really just run up and then catch them off guard. You know, is it is it like a breakaway and similar, but like not not as one on one, I guess. Hmm. Okay. Yeah. And it definitely in a weird way kind of informs the strategy of this very video game. You know, like it's one thing to be called.

04:06 I don't know. Mike Piazza's strike zone, which is a game on the N64. And it's like, wow, there's a strike zone in this game. Like, yeah, no. Okay. It's fine. Like every baseball game has a strike zone. And the objective of this one isn't to get strikes or avoid strikes. Like that's just a thing in base baseball, but in magic Johnson's fast break, specifically a fast break is a team that attempts to move the ball up court into a scoring position as quickly as possible.

04:32 But the defense is not prepared. And yet in this two on two game, that is exactly what you would want to do. You would want to get the ball, pass it all the way to the other side of the court as quickly as possible so that nobody's around to defend, you know, and continue to score. And that basically informed my strategy of playing this game. Good. That is good. I think two on two basketball, that's really the only way you can play it because I don't really think that having defensive strategy is something that you can do in two on two.

05:09 All you can really do is just try and steal the ball. So, yeah, I think, you know, fast breaks a great name for it. It takes the double dribble approach of two on two action rather than the NBA's five on five. But in double dribble and in this game and in NBA Jam, any of the two on two style games, the graphics usually aren't as or at least for the players aren't as tiny, I guess, as they are for Magic Johnson's fast break. You know, I usually expect my NBA players to be quite tall and lanky. And yet somehow on this game, they all look like they're five foot zero. It looks like they they designed the court and the sprites for your players thinking

05:56 that they were going to make a five on five basketball game. And then they just like really that's really hard. There's something about, you know, the A.I. or whatever, you know, something along those lines. And they're like, let's just do two on two. That simplifies things. And they just never redesigned the art.

06:14 Yeah, I mean, I'll also say that double dribbles, double dribbles, sprites and the court and everything is just like more detailed, too. So it's like, obviously, it's ridiculous to say like, oh, they look more realistic because they're all sprites on the NES. But something about the sprites in Magic Johnson just look a little more like cartoony, you know? So now do you guys think that you're that you're they're all Magic Johnson or that none of you are Magic Johnson? No, I think none of them are Magic Johnson just commenting.

06:46 He's just backseat playing. He's the announcer. Magic Johnson's the announcer. Is he the announcer? No, I'm joking, but. Yeah, that's the funniest thing. Like, okay. He's the floating head between shots. Yeah, the floating, the incredible. That's the only real thing that we have to talk about for this game is one, how basic everything is and to the very disquieting, interspersing headshots of Magic Johnson when anything happens that would that would like break play.

07:16 If you know when you're in double dribble and you pull off a dunk, you get like a pretty cool for its time little cut scene of a dunk because it looks better than the tiny sprites doing it. And then when you do a dunk in Magic Johnson's fast break, you just get this really weird staring face of the mugshot cut off at the neck of Magic Johnson. And he says, slam dunk. But but he says it with no matter what it is, he says it with no animation.

07:47 And it's just the way it's just there's one still pixel art image of Magic Johnson's space that they use for everything. It could be like violation. And he's just got this like this. This is just like Hollywood smile on or it could be like, yes, slam dunk. Or it could be like, try better next time. It's just nothing changes. Very feels very like slap dash.

08:09 Yeah, it feels very like tacked on like, oh, let's make this a Magic Johnson game. All right, cool. Here's his face. It would be like I feel like it to me, it would be like if this podcast had a video component instead of there being like, you know, the theme music for the essential games list or or just putting in little bits and pieces of music from the game between little sections to break it up. You just had a picture of a very widely smiling mic that that showed up and then it would would come back to us talking. It's just exactly. And he just said like he just said like great point.

08:49 The Magic Johnson floating head is prime material for a creepypasta where somebody accidentally buys a haunted version at a garage sale. And it starts saying that, you know, like first you take a shot and it's like nice shot, then keep it up. And then it's like they never found her body. You know, it's like that's what you're waiting for because he is staring at you soulless and without animation or without some kind of like early voice synthesizer. There's just like there's something missing about the Magic Johnson component. And then when you factor in that, it could be a little creepy. And then you start to like look at no one's on the benches or anything. It's like we're really just playing in Magic Johnson's dream.

09:30 We're playing his worst version of two on two basketball. What I get when I look at this at this image, because at first you're like, oh, that's a good like a good image of Magic Johnson in an NES game. It looks pretty good. And he's got this big smile on it. He doesn't look creepy himself. He looks to me like the more I look at the more it looks like he's saying, like, somebody help me.

09:53 Like it looks like he's been trapped in the NES cartridge and he's forced to smile. And it looks like I can hear him going, like, get help through his teeth. Well, we're all going on and on about this because there's really just it's really just that that makes it Magic Johnson. And the only other thing tying it to reality anyway is this pretty obscene for the time Pepsi sponsorship that's just always at midcourt. And you're never playing as any actual teams. It's just like Team A and Team B.

10:25 Because once you take the veneer of the the athlete name thing, like it's all you really got is a pretty basic basketball game. Well, you know who else is tied to Pepsi? Who dat? Michael Jackson, the other MJ. That's where the fire happened. And he famously. The fire? Yeah, it was like he was shooting like a commercial and they. Oh, my God. The pyrotechnics and they burn like it. Yeah. He got really hurt about it. Just unlocked them with a core memory or something. Yeah. And then later on, he actually said that he wished he would have died there because he would have been more famous for the death.

11:08 That's a weird take from Pepsi would have gone out of business. Yeah. But also, yeah, maybe he was like secretly a Coca Cola fan and was just pushing for that. But just tying it back to our MJ discussion. You're right, Sean. We are running out of things to talk about because of the blatant Pepsi sponsorship and floating Magic Johnson head. But I will say this.

11:28 OK, so we were ragging on the graphics a little bit for their scaling. Right. And that's just like a thing in general that we seem to notice. I don't know if gamers at the time really care, but we seem to notice when graphics are like either too big and become claustrophobic or too small and everything feels unimportant. And that's definitely the case here. Right. Like the action is just so limited because so much of the court is empty. But they didn't even give us like enough animation in in the gameplay for like a steal. A steal is just something that you press the button and then the ball goes into your possession. There's no like animation for like a hand. Right. Exactly.

12:12 So we're being robbed of even some of the most basic things that we might expect from these sports games. It'd be the equivalent of like, you know, in baseball, instead of throwing the ball to first, it just like you press the button to go to first. And it's just now it's in the first baseman's hand. It's like you got to see the pass. You got to see the steal. Well, that also it sort of it's the ball that affects the ball, too. Like sometimes if you're in the right spot on the court, you'll get a nice little arc. But most of the time, at least where I was shooting from, you're just going to get a straight line from the player's hand to the net. And it's either going to bounce out or it's going to go in.

12:58 And if by some by some mistake, you're past the three point line, you get treated to another little cutaway to Magic Johnson's face. But there's just there's so little detail here. And that goes to the shooting, too. Like just the the mechanic of shooting. There's no timing a shot and trying to and trying to release at the point of your apex or anything along those lines. You just press a button and then your guy will jump and shoot. And you've already you've just chosen where you're shooting.

13:33 Yeah. The whole the whole thing gameplay wise is just I mean, just bare bones. And I feel like we've played enough games that that, you know, I feel like I could say this. I this is this feels to me like it was released in 1985 and 1990. This feels like it is the basketball equivalent of like 10 yard fight or NES baseball where like when we were first playing and I wasn't even sure like what to expect from the NES. And I'm like, OK, this is a sports game. It's a very simple, very basic, like the bare bones of like of the sport. And as soon as I booted this up, this felt like this feels older than what we've been playing.

14:16 The high scores are salary. I guess they're saying like it's like related to money or whatever. But I when I was reading about it, took it to mean like a totally different thing. Like you would have to, you know, earn the money and make it through the ranks and some kind of like NBA street style thing where, you know, you basically like start off with X amount of dollars and then move up through and buy better players or something. But it's just your high score or whatever. And it's just determined by like the level of the team difficulty that you played against.

14:53 It's also weird that like you're I didn't even think I was going to be scored. I thought it was just a game where you play basketball. Right, right. Like the score is the score. There is no need for points. Right. Yeah.

15:05 But you can choose from five skill levels, rookie to professional. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And all that. Each. Did you try any of the other? Yeah, of course. I mean, why not challenge myself? Did you notice any difference? Did I notice any difference? Yeah, they were much better at making the shot. They make the shot.

15:23 They're always good at stealing, though. Yeah, that's true. But I guess you know what I'm saying? It's like the harder thing is that like in rookie, they'll give you the benefit of the doubt and miss the shot so that you don't always have to score. Yeah, I guess. I guess that's true. I just thought that the different for five levels, the difference between rookie and like whatever super expert or whatever the level is was was not a super expert, you know, like basketball.

15:50 But the difference was not noticeable enough. Like what are these if I can go from difficulty one to difficulty five and notice like a minimal difference, then what is what am I going to notice in two, three and four? Yeah, no, it's a good point. They don't need five levels of difficulty, especially for a game that doesn't feature NBA players in any capacity. Each game lasts for three minute real life quarters. I did not word that. I thought that was just such an interesting way to word how things how things work in this game that I copy and pasted it from the Wikipedia. But it's pretty funny.

16:27 Last for three minute real life quarters. There's just so many like numerical things in there that I didn't I didn't like it. Real life quarters. Yeah, I feel like real life should be coming before three minutes. Like a real life. Three real life minutes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, something just off about that. But just to lay it down there, you know, sure, whatever. Like three minutes is harmless, I guess, in the grand scheme of things. I don't forgive.

16:50 As I say, four of them back to back to back to back starts to feel a little long in a game where you've done all the mechanics in the first quarter. It feels long. And I also just point out, like, if we're going to go into the deepest, the darkest corners of our complaints of this game, I don't think you need two different fields in the UI for the shot clock. Like the shot clock is just the shot clock. I don't need to know if this team has a shot clock or if that team has a shot clock. The shot clock just needs to be read once. Yeah. So that's unforgivable. And I wrote that off before I even felt the game, you know? All right. Well, here's something positive, I guess.

17:35 You know, it's got a pretty comprehensive sense of, like, fouling and, you know, what's not allowed in basketball. So it keeps track of that stuff. Not every basketball game we've played has been so close to the rules as that. Yeah, backcourt violations aplenty. Yeah, again, maybe a positive because, to be honest, when I'm playing video game basketball, I don't mind goaltending. Well, no, that should definitely be that. No, I'm teasing. I'm saying, like, when it's in my favor, I'm happy to goaltend. But when it's in the computer's favor, they better get penalized for it.

18:17 And, you know, I guess it doesn't really matter the five skill levels or the length of the quarters. It only matters if you're having fun. And I guess one of the biggest ways to have fun with this game is that it did allow for four players. It was one of those that used the NES four score. And you could be doing true 2v2 basketball in your house. And so that, you know, that's got something going for it. But again, you have to like the actual game and then convince three other people that they also might like the game. I'd play with you, Mike.

18:48 Joe, would you join us? Of course. You know, I'm always a proponent of everything is more fun in multiplayer. But I don't know how much more fun this would be, but I would. All right. Well, unfortunately, that's only three. So, you know, we never talk about that. But yeah, no, but I was gonna say with these four score games, you know, we say like, yeah, four players, but technically like you can also do three and a computer, right? You can't here. There's a one player game, a two player game, and a four player game. You cannot do three. But we can feed the fourth controller into like chat GTT.

19:23 No, give it to Rob. Yeah. Can Rob do it? Yeah. Give it to Rob. Have him playing on a separate thing doing stack up and just hope that the inputs he puts in are enough. Actually, no, wait. That's not the one where he does the inputs. That's gyromite. So give him gyromite and see how that works for you.

19:45 On the sequels and spinoff side, believe it or not, there are a few other games that Magic Johnson is named after. They are not, you know, direct sequels or whatever to Magic Johnson's. He's named after games. Yeah, I guess I didn't word that the best way. The games are named after him or his likeliness or whatever. Or he said like, yeah, you could put my float. You could put my, I'm keeping continuity for the show, guys. All right. I have to commit now for the rest of my life.

20:13 Put the floating head on it. Maybe the other ones have floating heads. Maybe they don't. I really couldn't tell you. But here are the other sequels and spinoff games. And I'll give you like a how tall the basketball players look in each game ratio. Like a scale. A score out of five, yeah. Yeah, what's the. They're all basketball games. They're all basketball games, I believe. I don't think you got like a, you know, a math game or something like that. So wait, how am I doing the tallness scale? Is that. This game. This game's a zero. Okay. This game's a zero and five is like, they look like NBA players.

20:49 Five is they look like Kaiju. Okay, cool. So we're looking for like a three. Three would be solid. Okay. It's a longer in the next scale. It's like they're seven feet. If they're two, it's like they're six feet. If two, it's like they're five feet. If it's one, it's like they're four feet. Got it. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah. Very simple. And the audience is following along too. So this is great. Magic Johnson's MVP basketball, also known as Omniplay basketball, which is a little strange. I would give this a one. So it's a step above Magic Johnson's fast break. They're a little bit taller, but still there's room for improvement. Too short to play basketball. Wait a minute.

21:25 I'm lost on the scale. It doesn't matter. Wait, no. If they're tall. So what, are there a zero here? Yes, that was what Sean said. Sean said there was zero. Oh, okay. I wasn't listening. It's fine. Neither were the listeners. They've already tuned us out. So yeah, this is a one.

21:40 Team USA basketball. Magic Johnson's in that game. I'm giving these a three. They look like NBA players. NBA Live 2000. Again, a three. They look like them. Magic Johnson's NBA Live 2000. No, no, no, no. He's in it. Which is interesting because obviously he wasn't playing basketball in 2000. So it's like, you know, he was one of the legacy characters. Yeah. Now you're getting it. He was also in NBA 2K1 where I'm going to give this one a two. Not quite basketball NBA star level, but NBA 2K2 corrected it and got him back to that three. And then NBA 2K3 put him to like four. He's now too tall.

22:26 Are the rest of the players too tall too? No, just him. Just him. He just towers over him. ESPN NBA 2K5. No real comment about the height here, but I do wonder if they ever showed his face to him in this one and said like, yeah, you're going to look like this in the game. Um, because, uh, he looks, he looks a little swollen, uh, is what I'm going to say.

22:48 Uh, NBA Live 2006. Okay. Magic's looking a little more like magic in this one. And obviously so are the players because now it's like, okay, I don't think I need to recap the rest of them. Basically like they're just putting Magic Johnson in NBA games. But, uh, I, I guess it, you know, it's interesting that between years they are significantly changing what his face looks like on a year to year basis. Yeah.

23:12 I mean, it's pretty, I mean, nowadays, like I'd say the NBA 2K games are the best at actually capturing the facial structure and just like look of an athlete, um, as opposed to Madden where everyone kind of looks like cracked out and they haven't slept in 15 days. Um, but I, I, so I do think that basketball is probably top tier likeness, uh, uh, makers.

23:41 Whereas most other, most other sport games that, that try to do that, they're just not very good at it. Uh, it doesn't seem like this game was very good at it, but we have to do it anyway. We have to do the essential games list.

23:55 What does it mean to be good at the essential games list? That's a good question. Is every game that's essential good at the essential games list? Um, would you put that on the back of your box? Would you say an essential game, um, and mean it, uh, enough? Uh, Magic Johnson's fast break, uh, does not desire to be on the essential games list. It does not try hard enough. Uh, certainly wouldn't make, uh, the cuts, you know, for the varsity team of NBA basketball games on the NES, uh, let alone a shot at the essential games list. Uh, get it, a shot, um, wow, uh, out of basketball jokes, so just gonna leave it at no and move on to Sean.

24:36 This, this game tries to do nothing but make a quick buck. Like, this is, I think, the, the most blatant, uh, cash grab in, in sports games so far that we've played. Um, where it, it even has an advertisement in the game. And, you know, in, in some, like, late 90s, early 2000s world, like, people will say, like, oh, that adds to the realism. But, like, right now, right now, it's just like, oh, you, you put no budget into developing the mechanics. And, uh, you're, you, all you did was pay for the rights to, to this floating head. Um, so, no, I, I kinda, I kinda hate the core of this game.

25:17 Um, so not essential. Yeah, I'm gonna echo that. I think that this game feels really, really phoned in. It feels like they're like, okay, we have the rights to use Magic Johnson's likeness, and we gotta make a basketball game. Let's just, you know, let's just use Magic Johnson to sell it, and not really use any sort of, like, uh, trying to make a good game. Yeah, so, honestly, I feel like if I were Magic Johnson, I would be upset about this game. Maybe if I were Magic Johnson, and this took place, like, in a time where people were taking video games a little more seriously.

25:49 Like, maybe in, in the, in 1990, he was just like, whatever, yeah. But, like, I feel like today, an equivalent of this today, you'd be like, hold on. Like, I, I don't want my name attached to this, you know? Um, or, or the other equivalent is, like, if someone made, like, a Magic Johnson, like, movie deal, and they, like, filmed it in their backyard or something, and that was just, like, like, terrible. I, I, I, I feel like, uh, they did him dirty.

26:15 I would also add, as an interesting, um, you know, note, Magic Johnson's Fast Break is one of the, like, according to GameFAQs, least played NES games. People are able to, like, say whether they've played this game or not, and Magic Johnson's Fast Break is tracking at less than 100 people on GameFAQs. You know, that's a website that's been around for a very long time, and people are dedicated to logging that stuff. Has less than 100 plays, so, uh, I'm starting to think that this game didn't even sell that well, because. Is this, like, a Burger King, like, tie-in thing, but it came, you could. Came with a Pepsi bottle. Yeah, you could order it from your Pepsi caps or whatever.

26:55 Mail in 60 Pepsi caps and get Magic Johnson's Fast Break, or maybe eat, uh, Fast Break candy bars and hope to get the winning wrapper. Those don't exist yet, right? Yeah, that's true. Uh, anyway, uh, next week we'll be playing Magician. Um, you know, yeah. Uh, great follow-up. Yeah, as I was gonna say, great follow-up to Magic Johnson.

27:19 So, Magician will be great. It's apparently a side-scrolling ARPG. It's interesting that we're in that time where people specify side-scrolling. Um, like, if I just said it was an ARPG, you wouldn't ask me, well, is it side-scrolling? Like, would you, would you, would you, uh, take that into consideration? Well, when I think ARPG, I think of Diablo, which, which very much is not side-scrolling.

27:41 So maybe it was, like, some hacked version of, like, uh, of, like, an isometric view. I'm not one to judge. No, of course. I guess I'm not saying that you, I'm, I'm wondering if you even need to know. Like, would you, would your first question to me be, it's side-scrolling? Like, is it side-scrolling? Like, you wouldn't care, right? Like, so to put that right next to the genre is a little strange, no? I guess I just see it enough in genre-fication. Like, over-genrification.

28:06 So, no, but you're right, you're right. I wouldn't think that. But also, I wouldn't ask if my death metal was melodic or not, so. Yeah, that's true, but they should have said, like, at this point, then, Magician is a side-scrolling fantasy action role-playing game, right? Like, maybe I, right. Now I'm like, oh, is it sci-fi? Like, I don't know. Joe, any thoughts on genre naming? Nope. Okay, great. Well, then we'll just move right on.

28:29 Next, we'll move on to next week's episode. If you didn't listen to this episode by the following Friday, you can now just jump right into Magician. Isn't that cool? So, go ahead and jump into that, and we'll join you. That's cool and really easy to unpack. We'll be right back.