Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball (SNES) Playthrough
159A playthrough of Hudson Soft's 1991 license-based basketball game for the SNES, Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball.
This video shows the entire league mode:
2:23 Division 3
1:44:31 Division 2
3:19:53 Division 1
4:59:51 Super League
Bill Laimbeer rose to prominence in the NBA in the eighties as the center of the Detroit Pistons, a team that - in large part due to Laimbeer's temperament - gained a great deal of notoriety for its aggressive, dirty tactics on the court.
As neither a hero nor role model, Laimbeer was an odd pick for the starring role of a license-based sports game, but that didn’t seem to deter Hudson. In November of 1991, Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball became the first SNES basketball game to be released in America.
The game is a reskinned conversion of Future Basketball, an Amiga game that mixed the anything-goes attitude of Arch Rivals with the cold, metallic look of Speedball (Klashball on the NES). It replaced players with robots and loaded up the court with weapons, making it feel like a precursor to games like Base Wars and 2020 Super Baseball.
There are four leagues to work through, and once the cash prizes start rolling in you can trade your players for better ones. The dream team is five Bill Laimbeer robots, but at $2 million a pop, that'll take you a while. You don't have to worry about doing it all at once, though, since the game has a battery-backed save feature.
So far, so good, right? It sounds like it has all the makings of a fun sports cart, wouldn't you say?
I certainly thought so, but this is one game that takes its license a bit too far. Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball is wildly successful at making you feel like you've been punched in the face by a total prick who thrives on making other people miserable.
The controls haven't been changed to reflect the fact that the SNES controller has more than one button: the B button is used for shooting, passing, jumping, and tackling, and you'll regularly find yourself passing the ball to the opposing team or lunging at someone instead of shooting the ball. The game also automatically switches control to the player nearest the ball, so when the action gets busy, you have no idea who you'll be controlling from one moment to the next.
Furthermore, the AI is the most inept I've ever seen in a sports game. Your teammates blithely wander about with no regard for what's happening around them and the computer players often just freeze in the middle of a game. Check out the last few games of the Super League match-ups in this video and you'll see what I'm talking about. Unless you're trying to fail, it's virtually impossible to lose a game, especially once you've traded for a few good players.
It doesn’t help matters that there's no way of telling your players apart - everyone, including Laimbeer himself, looks exactly the same - and that the top-down perspective makes accurately judging the height of the ball impossible. The game also suffers from heavy slowdown when too much stuff starts moving around screen, which is a surprise given how plain the graphics are.
The SNES's 1991 line-up had its hits and misses, but Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball was the only abject failure of the bunch. It blows my mind that a company as well regarded as Hudson Soft put their name on such a display of sheer incompetence, and I'd honestly be surprised if no one got fired over how this turned out.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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