"And Trimark can’t develop"

I sure hope that the Jaguar debacle put Trimark Entertainment out of business, or at least on some form of probation. I was truly unaware how bad a basketball game could get -- this makes NCAA Final Four 2002 seem playable. If you are intending to play stagnant action based off of a bad movie, here’s your ticket. If you want to play basketball, get off the couch and go outside.

White Men Can’t Jump tried to shake up the sports genre by throwing a new style of basketball out there - half court. Trimark tried to do street ball years before NBA Street existed. And -- in the true tradition of street ballin’ -- a half court basketball game was born, as rarely do playground courts have hoops on both ends. Sounds good, but what this actually does is create a monotonous, slow-paced basketball game that the Utah Jazz would enjoy. Not very friendly to video games at all.

Even quirkier, this slow-moving basketball becomes a game of one-on-one, due to the computer’s ‘shadow defense.’ The defense doesn’t do anything, but get in your way and force bad passes, along with numerous instances of legal shoving -- another arcade game staple. Since it tends to be impossible to pass to your teammate, whoever takes the ball back generally takes the shot. This makes for an interesting scramble to switch character so your big scorer gets the ball, otherwise you ended up just wasting a possession.

Perhaps the worst part about the game being in the half court style is that you need to take the ball back every time. And even with the giant messages popping up on the screen and saying ‘CLEAR,’ I sometimes had difficulty telling whether or not I actually took the ball back, which led to some nullified baskets that could have helped me out a great deal. (I tended to ignore the giant pop-up messages.) This led to wasted baskets, which led to wasted time in my actual life, which led to me wanting to kill myself for playing something that bad for that long.

Graphically, this is the worst Jaguar game I have ever witnessed. The sprites are clunky looking, with the players looking like slow and awkward moving boxes. The animation is plodding and choppy, leading to some very random occurrences. It’s next to impossible to tell the female characters apart from the men. So what if some of them have ponytails! Maybe Dee Snyder’s a hidden playable character, and then how would you manage to tell them apart. Actually, you’d even have a hard time telling who was on your team if two players were not constantly jumping at you.

The environments are varied, I will give them that. Trimark did include quite a few different courts, set in various locales I assume are from the movie -- which I am proud to say I have never seen. Sadly the backgrounds look awful too, the buildings and horizons tend to smudge together, and a gray fog overtakes it all. At times I cannot even tell when a ball goes in the hoop or air balls in front of it because of the odd shading.

The only decent graphical effect worth mentioning is the overlay of the passing of money. (Tournament Mode relies on you repaying bets to two guys that look like the evil clones of Tommy Lee Jones - but fifteen years younger. Sadly Tommy Lee Jones is not in White Men Can’t Jump). These characters -- even if they’re only in a cut-scene -- actually look human, and are easily the best graphics featured in all of White Men Can’t Jump.

Well if White Man Can’t Jump would look bad as a first generation Super Nintendo game, it would only sound adequate for being among the initial batch of NES titles. The only time anyone managed to hear tinnier sound than in this game, in the mid nineties that is, are on Game Boy titles. The keyboard based tunes that were churned out for this title don’t even utilize chords! I would imagine that the song from the title screen is a brutalized version of the movie theme, but I couldn’t swear to it. The song’s quality is that poor and scratchy.

The sound effects are slightly better, but that really is not saying a whole lot. They mostly consist of seemingly random basketball noises, with some yelling and grunting thrown in. They also is a noise that sounds each time you clear over the line and ‘clear’ the ball, along with some primitive voice acting. I mute the sound effects too. If Atari had given the Jaguar a sound card that didn’t make speech so darn scratchy, then White Men Can’t Jump’s voice actin would have almost been acceptable. However, much more could have been featured and there could have been more dialogue between the people to whom the players are indebted. Still, the sound effects are clearly the best aspect of this dismal game.

If the sound effects are the best aspect of this cartridge of hell on earth, I would have to name the sporadic control as the worst aspect. First of all, there is a three-second delay from when you push a button and when the character responds on screen. What the hell is up with that? I tell Mace to shoot, and he kind of languishes there for a bit, allowing the opposing team to catch up and get in his face before he shoots, leaving Stress wide open and wishing you had passed the ball. Of course, with the shadow defense the pass would have flown in the opposite direction anyway, but that’s besides the point.

‘C’ is used to push people around, but the collision detection is so poor that pushes rarely connect. ‘A’ handles passing duties, but they almost never get to their destination, so why bother. Basically, you’ll be moving your character around with the directional pad, and shooting using ‘B.’ The other buttons will only be pressed on rare occasions, unless you like to run around randomly pressing ‘C’ hoping a shove will connect. One more quirk -- why does the options screen have to be launched from the pause screen? Pressing ‘Pause,’ then ‘Option’ seems rather unnecessary. Just pressing ‘Option’ should do the trick!

There is no way White Men Can’t Jump can be perceived by anyone as an entertaining game. There are just too many things wrong with it. I will give Trimark a little bit of credit -- supporting four player Team Tap (and better yet, enclosing it with the game) gave it a little bit of purpose, being one of the earliest games to utilize four-player support, now taken for granted by everyone except for Sony in the industry. White Men Can’t Jump includes Versus Mode and Tournament Mode, but calling the latter Story Mode would be far more evident. Your goal in that is to pay back your debtors their money by betting on the games you play in. Isn’t that what got Pete Rose in trouble? Regardless of the legal implications, the quicker you get them their money back, the quicker you can end your misery. I do wish an actual Tournament Mode was included (creating a tournament ladder amongst the teams), as well as a Season Mode. But Trimark should have known that no one would have actually wanted to suffer through a full season of this garbage.

Even discounting the fact that it is difficult to sit through a game of White Men Can’t Jump, the way the artificial intelligence goes about its defense is sure to cause you fits. Because of the unexpected lag between button press and in-game action, the defenders have time to contest your shots. The computer-controller players swarm the ball, as well as pushing and shoving violently to prevent you from scoring. One more thing adding to the difficulty are the odd shooting physics. I routinely make shots over a much taller defender, but then I’ll dribble up the lane and miss a wide open lay-up. Just trying to determine which shots actually have a shot of going in adds to the already monumental difficulty, to make this one of the most challenging sports games around.

Replay value? After reading this review do you ever think you would want to play this game at all, let alone more than once? Seriously, if you wanted to play this game more than once, I’d find you a psychiatrist personally. They would have you in an asylum in a week.

It’s possible to count the excellent movie-based games on one hand. Sadly, I don’t think a graphing calculator could manage to keep track of all of the horrible ones released. White Men Can’t Jump falls into this group, among the worst and the worst of it, along with games like Cutthroat Island and the Matrix. (Oh, right. The Matrix isn’t out as a game yet, but I think it’ll be an accurate foreshadowing.) Let the licensed crap stay at the bottom of the bargain bins where they belong. Don’t touch White Men Can’t Jump, even if you have Woody Harrelson posters on your wall.

PROS
*Um . . . there are fifteen teams.
*Hmmm . . . supports the Team Tap for four-player gaming.
*My power switch isn’t stuck.

CONS
*Gameplay and control are slow, erratic, and boring.
*Graphics are poor based on 1991 standards.
*Music is poor based on 1985 standards.

SCORE SUMMARY

GAMEPLAY--2
GRAPHICS--1
MUSIC--1
SOUND--2
CONTROL--1
FUN--1
CHALLENGE--MEDIUM TO HIGH
REPLAY VALUE--LOW

OVERALL--1

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 07/07/02, Updated 07/07/02