Wayback Wednesday: Bulls vs. Blazers and the NBA Playoffs

This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at Bulls vs. Blazers and the NBA Playoffs.

As I’ve mentioned in previous Wayback Wednesday retrospectives and other articles, my introduction to basketball gaming was through NBA Jam Tournament Edition, NBA Live 95, and NBA Live 96. To that end, I don’t have the same nostalgia for the NBA Playoffs series – EA’s forerunner to NBA Live – as people who got into hoops and the virtual hardwood earlier than I did. The massive jump that took place with NBA Live 95 made it difficult to truly appreciate its predecessors at first, but as I’ve collected them and given them a proper chance, they’ve definitely grown on me.

I’ve jumped around a little as I’ve covered these classics for Wayback Wednesday. I tipped things off with the Olympic spinoff Team USA Basketball, went back to the beginning with Lakers vs. Celtics, and then most recently profiled NBA Showdown. Since chronological order is already out the window and a retrospective is overdue anyway, I figured I wouldn’t waste any more time getting to Bulls vs. Blazers! The final game to bear the “NBA Playoffs” branding may have been surpassed by its successors, but it’s still a classic release. Let’s take a look back…way back…

Even after I finally bought a Super Nintendo towards the end of its lifespan, Bulls vs. Blazers remained an intriguing, tantalising game on the shelf of my local video game store. That store – sadly now long-gone – was run by friendly staff who knew their stuff, and sold new and used games with an excellent trade-in policy. They had a used copy of Bulls vs. Blazers that remained in stock for years, undoubtedly because – as a sticker they’d placed on the box warned – it was an NTSC import. Unless you had an adapter to play NTSC and Famicom games, it wouldn’t work on a PAL SNES. Since I didn’t have an adapter until years later, there was no use picking it up back then.

However, unlike Lakers vs. Celtics, Bulls vs. Blazers was not a North American exclusive. Although my local store didn’t have it at the time, there was indeed a PAL version, which I’ve since picked up. It was also the first game in the NBA Playoffs series to be released for Super Nintendo; in fact, it hit the SNES before the Genesis and Mega Drive! This is significant, as compared to the later NBA Live games, the NBA Playoff series is more associated with Sega, with those releases often regarded as superior to their Nintendo counterparts. Nintendo vs. Sega remains nostalgically debated to this day, but I will point out again that the series actually debuted on PC!

While NBA Showdown was moving towards the major overhaul and improvement that came with NBA Live 95, Bulls vs. Blazers bears a greater resemblance to their predecessors. The EA Sports branding appears in-game as part of the presentation, but it’s still an Electronic Arts production. Rather than featuring the entire league, the game includes just 18 teams, namely the 16 clubs that qualified for the 1992 NBA Playoffs, and the East and West All-Star squads. As such, there’s no regular season play. On the whole, the gameplay is extremely similar to other games in the NBA Playoffs series, though again, it’s closer to the previous titles than NBA Showdown.

Of course, it’s important to keep in mind that the genre was still in its relative infancy, and while the gameplay in Bulls vs. Blazers is dated in many ways, it has strengths that stand out even today. As much as I’m nostalgic for the isometric camera that NBA Live 95 introduced, I do like the horizontal, broadcast-style view of the NBA Playoffs games. It provides a good view of the court, and as a fan of NBA Jam, it’s certainly familiar! The players stand out even with 16-bit graphics, the special moves feel ahead of their time in some respects, and basic NBA rules are accounted for. For the 16-bit era, it’s a fun and respectably realistic virtual representation of basketball.

From a control standpoint, the biggest drawback compared to modern games – or even early NBA Live titles for that matter – is the lack of a sprint/turbo button. This does slow the pace of the game somewhat, making explosive moves difficult to pull off. At the same time, quicker players do have an advantage, and diagonal movement also helps with small speed boosts that allow you to elude and blow by defenders. On the other hand, it does have a steal button, which wasn’t the case in early NBA Live on PC and Sega. Granted, as I’ve noted, that animation looks more like a shove/hand check than a swipe at the ball, but even without sprint/turbo, the controls are solid.

Appropriately, one of the best gameplay mechanics in Bulls vs. Blazers and other NBA Playoffs games is the marquee moves. These signature moves were not only effective offensive weapons, but added impressive authenticity. That may sound like nostalgic exaggeration given the simple player models and limited animation of the era, but we shouldn’t undersell the effort that went into replicating signature highlights with the tech that was available. Whether it’s Michael Jordan’s “Air Reverse” layup, Tim Hardaway’s UTEP 2-Step, or Charles Barkley’s Monster Dunk, it’s satisfying to get to the correct hotspot and trigger a spectacular move that only they can perform.

Mind you, while this approach is intuitive and fun, it does allow marquee moves to be easily spammed! Playing with the Chicago Bulls on 12-minute quarters, MJ ended up pulling off his signature up-and-under reverse at least 12 times, even when I wasn’t necessarily aiming to do it! As with the inflated number of dunks though, that’s just the way it goes in video games, and it’s still entertaining to see every time it happens. In old basketball games, it was vital that we had a move we could rely on when all else failed, so I’m not complaining! For all of the major improvements that came with the revamp in NBA Live 95, it’s a shame that signature moves were lost for so long.

Apart from that, there are some exciting dunk animations, though layups definitely do look a bit awkward. Although there are no numerical ratings, player statistics indicate their strengths and weaknesses. The attention to detail that the developers put into player performance is most commendable. I’ll admit that I’m sometimes surprised by the amount of differentiation in player skill in old school games, before ratings and tendencies were the norm! Shot distribution is good, with the correct players usually scoring the most points and in a manner that you’d expect. The T-Meter returns, and there are player injuries and instant replay. It’s primitive, but it can still be fun today.

With that being said, it does show its age in some respects. As mentioned, the lack of a turbo/sprint control does mean the game lacks explosiveness, and it’s kind of slow-paced compared to its successors. Scores can be absurdly high on 12-minute quarters. This is particularly noticeable after playing NBA Showdown, which produced more realistic numbers in a full length game. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but future games were clearly striving for more realism. Jumpshots are too hit-and-miss with the dice rolls, and are blocked way too easily on the perimeter. If you need to score in a hurry to close a deficit, driving and spamming marquee moves is the way to go.

Then again, you need to be careful here. While I’ve had fewer cheap charging calls in comparison to NBA Showdown, that was a staple of the NBA Playoffs series, and Bulls vs. Blazers is no exception. Indeed, fouls are a problem in general. It’s far too easy for your key players to get into foul trouble in the first quarter, even if you’re not aggressively vying for steals and blocks. Too many whistles are blown on incidental contact, which is even more frustrating when it’s a CPU-controlled teammate that picks up the foul! Furthermore, although you will get fouled, the CPU opponents seem a lot smarter and adept at avoiding whistles compared to your teammates.

Several other recurring issues from the NBA Playoffs series can likewise be found in Bulls vs. Blazers. A majority of rebounds are flat-footed, almost always falling to the power forward or centre. Big men are left to bring the ball up the floor, often because of unnecessary full court pressure. Long passes are basically impossible, which slows the pace and makes fast breaks difficult unless they begin with a stop near half court. There aren’t enough stops around the rim compared to swats on the perimeter, which means an offensive board is usually a guaranteed bucket outside of a charging foul or a very unlucky dice roll. Contrived cold streaks point to some harsh rubber-banding.

In all fairness, this is a combination of technological limitations and a need to keep games competitive. You can’t judge a game from the early 90s, developed for 16-bit consoles, by modern standards. However, given the improvements that NBA Live 95 would demonstrate in just a couple of years’ time, I do think it’s fair to say that the NBA Playoffs series didn’t innovate nearly as much as its successor went on to do. It’s why I was somewhat unimpressed when I first played those games, having grown up with titles that had already taken that next step. That’s also why I understand it when younger gamers can’t appreciate how groundbreaking some of the old classics were!

Nevertheless, while it doesn’t hold up as well as NBA Live 95 or the original NBA Jam games, I can still have fun with Bulls vs. Blazers. If nothing else, the marquee moves add something special to the gameplay that you didn’t see in a lot of games at the time, or over the next decade for that matter. There’s enough attention to detail with player abilities to make it matter who’s on the floor, and how you’re using them. Once you’ve got the hang of speed boosts and the mechanics in general, it’s satisfying to dunk on the defense, rip the ball or swat a shot to start the fast break, and knock down a long bomb to the sound of “THREE“. It’s a bit clunky, but I do appreciate it.

I also remain a fan of the presentation in Bulls vs. Blazers. As with the early NBA Live games, I love that they included digitised portraits of the players and displayed the starting lineups. Studio hosts Bing Gordon and K.C. Darty do get repetitive – though, so do the hosts and commentators in modern games eventually – but those studio introductions were a nice touch that made the most out of the finite space for such details. It emphasised that the goal was to replicate NBA basketball and an NBA broadcast as accurately as possible, given the technology they had to work with. It’s easy to point out flaws, but there’s no question that those games were made with love.

As I mentioned, much like Bulls vs. Lakers, Bulls vs. Blazers includes all 16 teams from the previous Playoffs; a welcome expansion on the selections of eight teams that had been in both versions of Lakers vs. Celtics. At the same time, it was an outdated approach now that Tecmo Super NBA Basketball had included the entire league, as well as a full season mode in addition to the postseason tournament. Conversely, like its predecessors, Playoffs was the only mode in Bulls vs. Blazers. Progress was saved with a password system rather than battery backup; a good workaround in the days of cartridges, but writing them down and punching them in was always a bit of a hassle!

Tecmo Super NBA Basketball also included a couple of other options and features that Bulls vs. Blazers didn’t, spotlighting how the NBA Playoffs series was beginning to lack depth. For example, Tecmo Super NBA Basketball allowed us to view the rosters and change the game speed; common options now, but you won’t find them in Bulls vs. Blazers. It also had basic on-the-fly playcalling, a mechanic that EA’s games wouldn’t adopt until NBA Live 95. Bulls vs. Blazers and the other games in the NBA Playoffs series were still strong releases that matched up well with their competition, but they were definitely lacking in a few areas where other games were innovating.

On the other hand, as with Lakers vs. Celtics and Bulls vs. Lakers, Bulls vs. Blazers allows gamers to select from three difficulty levels: Pre-Season, Regular Season, and Showtime. Of course, the Playoff tournament is automatically set to the Showtime difficulty, and unlike exhibition play, it can’t be changed. I understand what they were going for there, but in hindsight, I think it was the wrong design choice for the NBA Playoff series to make. Yes, it represented the challenge of the postseason and set the mode apart from games with no stakes, but customisation and accessibility are vital. NBA Live made the sensible change to allow the difficulty to be set in each mode.

Quarter length is the only other gameplay setting that we can change in Bulls vs. Blazers, with the available options being two, five, eight, or the regulation 12 minutes. Interestingly, Tecmo Super NBA Basketball’s quarter length settings are two, three, four, eight, and 12 minutes, while the early NBA Live games made three minutes the minimum setting. Given the inflated scores on 12-minute quarters, I’d suggest that Bulls vs. Blazers is optimised for five or eight minute periods, though it obviously depends on how much realism you desire. Unlike the difficulty level, quarter length can be customised for the tournament if you’d prefer a quicker Playoff experience.

Obviously, the inclusion of real NBA players and a proper Playoffs mode gives it an advantage over earlier games such as Double Dribble. However, the absence of the rest of the league, a full season mode, and any kind of roster customisation, limits the depth and replay value. Gamers have undoubtedly played through multiple Playoffs on top of countless exhibitions in Bulls vs. Blazers, but other games – from Tecmo Super NBA Basketball to NBA Showdown to NBA Live 95 – offered so much more. That doesn’t make Bulls vs. Blazers a terrible game, but it can be completed much quicker. Its model for content and game modes was definitely becoming outdated.

The rosters are from the 1992 season, which featured some interesting lineups beyond the titular Bulls and Blazers led by the duos of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, and Clyde Drexler and Terry Porter respectively. There are the pre-Charles Barkley Suns, led in scoring by Jeff Hornacek. Chuck of course is only available on the East All-Stars, as the 76ers missed the 1992 postseason. In addition to David Robinson and Sean Elliott, the Spurs have Terry Cummings and Rod Strickland. The Pacers have a trio of three-point gunners in Reggie Miller, Chuck Person, and Detlef Schrempf. The Lakers, Celtics, and Pistons are fading into a new era, and the Knicks are on the rise.

Because I grew up with the early NBA Live games, I was used to Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley being missing players. Adding them in games using Create-a-Player or via external modding was a ritual that I’d become very familiar with. Thus, it was a pleasant surprise when I finally played the NBA Playoffs games, and discovered that they were in the rosters by default! Honestly, it’s still a treat to see them in those titles today. Bulls vs. Blazers also managed to keep Magic Johnson playable thanks to the 1992 All-Star squads. In addition to Sir Charles and Magic, Dominique Wilkins and Dikembe Mutombo were also in Bulls vs. Blazers thanks to their All-Star selections.

Unlike NBA Showdown and NBA Live 95, the rosters in the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive versions of Bulls vs. Blazers are identical. The graphics and audio are noticeably different of course, which even today encourages a renewal of the ancient Nintendo vs. Sega debate! Personally, I’m glad that Bulls vs. Blazers made inroads into EA’s basketball games coming to Nintendo, and being released on multiple platforms. We’ve seen what happens when basketball games are exclusive to a specific console, not to mention the drawbacks of a lack of competition. In the midst of a fierce console war, Bulls vs. Blazers was available to hoop heads on both sides.

Once again, it’s tough for me to not come across as overly critical of the games in the NBA Playoffs series, especially since I’ll readily gush about the NBA Live titles that I truly believe were ahead of their time. The more that I’ve played games like Bulls vs. Blazers, Lakers vs. Celtics, and NBA Showdown, the more I’ve come to appreciate them, and genuinely have fun on the virtual hardwood. I do miss the innovations that came along just a few years later, and I admit it’s hard not to hold that against NBA Live’s predecessors. Games should be judged by the standards of their era, but it’s fair to criticise a lack of accessibility and depth, and any elements that haven’t aged well.

The lack of a turbo/sprint control is an issue that plagued many classic basketball games from the late 80s and early 90s, and they don’t hold up as well as some of their successors as a result. Primitive collision and detection logic made it too easy to rack up fouls, while jumpshots from 15 feet and further out really weren’t as reliable as they should’ve been. The NBA Playoffs games definitely suffered from these issues, but they weren’t the only titles that did, so they don’t stand out as inferior to their peers. In fact, while many gamers may have understandably preferred Tecmo Super NBA Basketball, Bulls vs. Blazers was one of the era’s premiere basketball titles.

Other classics – including the early NBA Live releases – offer a deeper retro gaming experience nowadays. Still, Bulls vs. Blazers remains fun to dust off, whether it’s for a few exhibition games, or a run through the Playoffs. If you choose shorter quarters, you can probably win a title over a weekend! It probably won’t be your first choice unless it’s a nostalgic favourite, and even then, you might find that it isn’t as playable having experienced newer games; even ones from the late 90s and early 2000s. If it’s as fun for you as it ever was though, I absolutely understand. It’s grown on me, and I’m sure that I’ll fire it up every now and again, if only to pull off the marquee moves!

To that point, during my sessions with the game ahead of writing this retrospective, I had a fantastic time taking on the Cavaliers with the Bulls. It was wild shootout that saw MJ score 67 points while Pip went down with an injury, and it wasn’t until the final minutes that I took control of the game for good. Before that though, Pip had a block that led to a wide open 360 jam by His Airness, which you may have seen in our Top 10. The sequence felt natural, and so satisfying! Yes, there were some clunky and contrived moments as the AI rubber-banded, but there were so many exciting plays as well. I’ve ended up making some great memories with Bulls vs. Blazers.

With that in mind, I do wonder how I would’ve felt about Bulls vs. Blazers if I’d been able to play it back in the 90s. How nostalgic would I feel about it today? I’d like to think that I’d have affection and appreciation for it, and I’m sure I would’ve found joy in the novelty of actually having Michael Jordan in the game. However, as someone who was once an NBA Live fanboy, open-mindedness about sim games that do things differently is something I’ve had to develop. It’s possible that I wouldn’t have truly seen the value in it and given it a fair chance until years later. Even today, I have to be aware of my nostalgia and biases when I evaluate old games for these retrospectives.

Then again, I really embraced World League Basketball – the PAL version of NCAA Basketball by Sculptured Software – which is similarly primitive, lacks a turbo/sprint control, and doesn’t even feature real players, NBA or otherwise! I probably wouldn’t have preferred Bulls vs. Blazers to my favourite NBA Live titles, but I’d like to think I could’ve had fun with it all the same. The fact that it was an EA game and part of NBA Live’s lineage likely would’ve helped somewhat, and as I’ve said before, even as a young gamer, I had a predisposition to play older games. Nevertheless, I’m glad that I’ve been able to give NBA Live’s predecessors a chance, and that I’ve enjoyed them.

Also, while Bulls vs. Blazers didn’t introduce mechanics such as marquee moves and the T-Meter, the developers recognised what they had with those ideas and kept them around, building upon previous releases. Both NBA Live and NBA 2K have suffered from abandoning or altering features and mechanics too quickly, so there’s something to be said for consistency. While the NBA Playoffs series didn’t innovate with huge leaps as much as NBA Live would during its first decade of releases, it stayed the course with commendably consistent quality. There were legacy issues, and Bulls vs. Blazers also had some of its own quirks, but there was no major drop-off in the series.

It’s easy to focus on the outdated aspects of Bulls vs. Blazers and the rest of the NBA Playoffs series, but we also need to acknowledge the elements that were ahead of their time. The accuracy in how players perform for both gamers and the AI is surprisingly good, and better than some NBA Live titles. Likewise, while it introduced an array of dunk packages, NBA Live didn’t really dabble with special abilities until Freestyle Superstars in NBA Live 06, and true signature moves didn’t come along until Go-To Moves in NBA Live 08. Too often, these games are completely written off or simply don’t get enough credit, just because they’re old with graphics that are now surpassed.

Bulls vs. Blazers may not be EA’s deepest or best basketball game, but it still has some strong points and a wonderful vibe. It embodies a time when we’d echo the NBA’s slogan “I love this game” without irony or cynicism, because that’s truly how we felt! From the music and presentation to the signature moves and authenticity, Bulls vs. Blazers was all about representing the NBA circa 1992. It’s not a personal favourite, and it most likely won’t retroactively become one, but I appreciate its vibe and how it helped pave the way for a golden age on the virtual hardwood. Classics like it are always worth remembering, and also re-playing, if only from time to time.

The post Wayback Wednesday: Bulls vs. Blazers and the NBA Playoffs appeared first on NLSC.