The Closeout Warrior

I’ve never been a very big basketball fan, so I don’t really know why I ever played Jordan vs. Bird. It’s very possible that I ran out of both money and fun games to play.

Jordan vs. Bird is primarily a basketball game where you can take control of one of the titular characters, Michael Jordan or Larry Bird, in a one-on-one basketball contest. Since Bird is apparently known for his 3-point shots, and Jordan for his dunking ability, playing a game pitting the strengths of each of these pros should be pretty close: one player plays well close to the goal, and the other further away. However, Bird is able to dunk, while Jordan has pretty appalling performance from 3-point land, almost completely destroying the already tenuous balance between near range and far range.

Of course there are other things you can do, you can play as either Jordan or Bird in a dunking contest or a 3-point shooting contest respectively. Neither one was very fun, but the song from the 3-point contest is incredibly catchy, in the bad way.

This game is really only fun if you have two players… and you get to be Larry Bird. And even then, only just.

I had never heard of Clu Clu Land during the heyday of the NES, and I wouldn’t until years after the system was out of favor with the masses and I unlocked it in my copy of Animal Crossing. Old NES games in Animal Crossing didn’t come with manuals, so I have to admit that I don’t really know what’s going on. I was able to piece some info together using my game playing knowledge and the description found on my Super Smash Bros. Melee Trophy, but I’m willing to admit that my understanding might be somewhat incomplete.

Bubbles, the protagonist, must navigate what looks like a game of Dots. The ‘dots’ in this case being objects that she can grab onto. She will go in a straight line forward unless she reaches out and grabs hold of one of the dots, or smashes into something to turn around. Grabbing onto the ‘dots’ will allow her to turn and go a different direction. Her goal, it would appear, is to search out and uncover shiny objects that will often be in the outline of a simple shape. She must do all of this while avoiding the sea-urchin things that are pursuing her. Find all the shiny things, move on to the next level where the sea urchins move faster and are more aggressively and the pattern that the shiny things are in changes.

I wasn’t ever able to get past more than about two waves, but I also didn’t really enjoy the game all that much to begin with. I’m not terribly disappointed that I didn’t get to play this during the NES’s lifetime.

If you were a kid in the late 1980s through the early 1990s and had Nickelodeon, or knew someone that did, you were familiar with Double-Dare. I’m talking about the original show instead of the later, and not nearly so fun spinoffs. The show where two teams competed in trivia contests and (often messy) physical challenges in effort to win a sum of prize money and some ridiculous prizes. For those of you not familiar with the formula of the show, it goes something like this: One of two teams of two kids is asked a question, they can either answer it or ‘Dare’ the other team to answer it for ‘double the dollars’, the other team could either answer it or ‘Double Dare’ the first team to answer it, doubling the value yet again. The first team had to either attempt to answer the question or take a ‘physical challenge’ instead. The physical challenges were the real hook for the show, they let the kids do bizarro stunts and get extremely messy in the process.

For the most part, the game was pretty close to the actual show, you answered ridiculously easy trivia questions (with the occasional abnormally difficult one thrown in to almost guarantee a physical challenge). The problems come up when you actually try to play the physical challenges. Running around trying to catch a series of pies in your comically large clown pants just isn’t as fun with a controller as it is with actual pies and pants, and some of the invented challenges, like being shot out of a cannon through some holes in a giant wooden picture of spaghetti would have never made it on television.

Whichever team comes out of the first round with the most money gets to go to the Obstacle Course, which is a series of eight specialized physical challenges in a row that the team gets one minute to complete. Again, not as fun as actually doing the events in person. Also, the events were mostly of the ‘mash one or two buttons repeatedly’ or ‘wiggle the controller/joystick repeatedly’ to complete. One obstacle in particular was something that looked like a giant mound of marshmallow cream that you had to scale, and I could never figure out what combination of buttons and control pad directions that I had to press and wiggle to complete the obstacle. I have never managed to complete the virtual obstacle course to win the virtual crappy prize at the end.