Videogame Review, RealSports Basketball for the Atari 5200 Console

Videogame Review, RealSports Basketball for the Atari 5200 Console

This is a sweet basketball game which demands notice from its relevance for the Intellivision in dominating fashion.  You’ve got blue and red, home and visitor.  A basketball court is lined up with the intrigued crowd of fans who support their own teams with appropriate basketball jerseys.  Computer difficulties in this unreleased 5200 game are reversed: easy is actually hard, and hard is actually easy.  Of course the computer’s difficulty is limited and it’s wise to pull in a friend for some basketball gameplay with delicious controller buttons to match.  Gameplay isn’t just limited to the red fire buttons but also includes the ergonomic feel of the 5200 joystick- in fact, the joystick feels soft to the touch during gameplay, overriding the Intellivision’s disk with its own 360-degree interface.  My joystick only needs a slight tug to get the basketball player going and you can stop him on the basketball court with a slight tug back.  When playing RealSports Basketball, it’s good to put on the brakes as if we need to “move” to get the basketball player to stop, but the gameplay is really vivid, two basketball hoops with nets that actually drift in the breeze under the decorated pole bases.  The photo I have for this basketball game comes from another version of the Galaxy 7 cell phone.  You’ll see that the basketball court looks really modern, futuristic, with the laser-shot lines drawn on the floor where all the mayhem occurs in considerable fashion.  Some old games for the Intellivision console had no computer to speak of for controlling the athletes on the field and my 5200 basketball game is an obvious influence resulting from the Intellivision influence.  I’ve watched basketball in real life on TV and I can say, with confidence, that RealSports Basketball is more like a fantasy sport than real life, and that’s okay, because the trackball controller can be an excuse to get down and dirty with your opponent.  I’m meaning the 5200 Trackball Controller.  There’s enough motive in my soul to keep that trackball spinning for my basketball player’s moving legs; the basketball player actually really looks well-defined; I can see his clothes move with the breeze and the program’s constant messages on the bottom of the TV screen make me laugh- “I’M FALLING WAY BEHIND!”  No Intellivision disk will need to be controlled for this 5200 thing.  It all flows very nicely.  So just as long as you remember that hard is easy and easy is hard you’ll get the hang of the Atari 5200 SuperSystem.  A basketball game like this one here is sharp, well-focused, and the effects made in noise will appeal to Intellivision fans as well as 5200 fans.