Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden Chapter 1

Now normally I would review games that are tangible and actually exist in cartridge or CD form at one point.  But this is different for this game can be downloaded free from the internet and it's for all intents and purposes a PC game.  As for the this game itself, many years ago there was a real game called Barkley: Shut Up and Jam which was basically a NBA Jam clone that nobody remembers.  Anyways so some guys teamed up to extrapolate the world of Shut Up and Jam & make it into a RPG.  What were the results of this crazy game?  Let's find out as we did into Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden Chapter 1.

In the year 2041, Charles Barkley wishes to impress his son Hoopz performs the Chaos Dunk which destroys all of New York City ushering in Cyber-apocalypse and the Great B-Ball Purge which killed thousands upon thousands of B-Ballers with few surviving B-Ballers in which the leader of B-Ball Removal Force is Michael Jordan.  12 years later, our story begins as Charles Barkley and Hoopz eke out a depressing existence at Neo New York city.  However, another Chaos Dunk was performed at Man Manhattan killing 10 to 15 million people and Barkley is blamed since he's the only mortal that can performed such a dunk.  Michael Jordan and his force comes looking for Barkley and he flees.  What follows is a crazy adventure that involves a Vince Carter cyborg, Ghost Dad, Wilfred Brimley and Juwanna Mann among many others.  Oh, the events of Space Jam are real and there are references to the Space Jam ball that trapped Barkley and some other non-Barkley guys.

The really shocking thing is how straight the game plays this.  Nothing is ever explicitly played for laughs and from behind all the silliness is how well-written the whole thing is.  Charles Barkley is actually a three-dimensional character as he embarks on his quest from a depressed, self-loathing jerk into someone who actually deserves to be called Charles Barkley as he regains his confidence and moral compass.  The fact that it can take B-ball and present as The Sport of Gods and Serious Business & make it work is quite a remarkable feat.

The one bad thing about this is the controls.  I mean for the most part it is responsive but it is a bit buggy which is understandable being a fan-made game than a real game from a real company.  When you move from screen-to-screen, there's a 50-50 chance that you'll stop moving if you're holding on to the arrow keys.  The menu system is a bit out-dated with it not automatically canceling when you use an item that results in you losing all of them if you weren't paying attention.  But here I'm just nit-picking for most of the time the controls do what you want them to do.  The best the controls are during the battles where it plays like the Super Mario RPG games. There's button mashing and holding the attack button to get the most damage so this is something you can't be passive about.

Now the main draw of this game is it's total craziness in its side quests.  There's one side quest where you have to rewrite a terrible love poem so it's actually less pathetic.  There's another where you have to negotiate a labor contract between the some dwarves and genies where favoring dwarves gets a kimino with a picture of Shrek and favoring genies gets a magic lamp with Kazaam in it....it's not as bad as you think.  You get to an island by riding the Underground Railroad with Harriet Tubman as the conductor.  You have a quest to save Hoopz from Type 2 Diabetes, the type no one has been able to cure.  And that's just a few of the things that's just utter insanity.

So this game is really good for a fan-made RPG or hell, any game.  The story is simultaneously epic and silly that is definitely awesome.  The music is extremely awesome with a quality that's comparable to Chrono Trigger or Donkey Kong Country 2 and there's a track sung by Ian Gilliam, the singer of the famous line-up of Deep Purple for an epic boss battle with the song making the battle so epic that you'll head will explode.  The only real flaw is the buggy controls but even then you can just work around them.  So I now wait for Chapter 2 of this thing to be released....and it is being worked on.

8/10

If you want to play the game: http://www.gamingw.net/forums/index.php?topic=68488.0