hue@netcom.UUCP (Jonathan Hue) (01/18/90)
I picked up Magic Johnson's Basketball last week. You've probably seen the ads for this where they claim the 1MB Amiga versions are identical to the arcade versions. It plays two-on-two, and if you play two player you each control one guy on each team. An arrow appears over the head of the player you are controlling. On offense this is always the guy with the ball, on defense you can switch players by holding the button down and moving the joystick up. The game is very playable. On offense you can run around, pass, and shoot. If you shoot while your teammate is under the basket you can sometimes get him to do an alley-oop. You can do slam-dunks too, but for some reason I haven't figured out, it looks better when your opponent dunks than when you do. On defense you can steal the ball, and block shots. There are other maneuvers described in the manual that I haven't tried yet. The only other sports simulation I have is Cinemaware TV Sports Football, which IMHO sucks the big one. In that game you hardly have any control over your players, with MJBB you can really involve yourself in the game because you have so much more control over the players. You can get called for charging or reaching in. I've never seen it do a 3-point play, but there are 3-point field goals. Sometimes your teammate will knock down an opponent and a fight will break out. Once the fight is over it's a jump ball. The game can be installed on a hard drive, and is not copy protected. It comes in 512KB and 1MB versions, but I have never seen the 512KB version. There is one problem though. Whenever I ran it there was a little rectangular area of garbage on the screen, about ten pixels wide by a hundred pixels high. It went away whenever I disabled my A590 and booted from the original disks. I finally figured out I could use SetPatch 1.32 and everything worked fine with the A590, so I just made up a floppy with 1.32 SetPatch on it, boot from it, then run the game off my hard drive. I'm going to call them tomorrow and see if they have an update. It's a fine game, runs from a hard drive and isn't copy protected, it's a shame it has this one flaw. -Jonathan
hue@netcom.UUCP (Jonathan Hue) (01/20/90)
In article <5778@netcom.UUCP> hue@netcom.UUCP (Jonathan Hue) writes: > >There is one problem though. Whenever I ran it there was a little rectangular >area of garbage on the screen, about ten pixels wide by a hundred pixels >high. It went away whenever I disabled my A590 and booted from the original >disks. I finally figured out I could use SetPatch 1.32 and everything worked >fine with the A590, so I just made up a floppy with 1.32 SetPatch on it, boot This is incorrect. The problem went away because I updated FFS, not because of a different version SetPatch. MJBB works fine for me now off a hard drive, in fact, I can no longer reproduce the problem. I don't know the original cause of the problem was, I couldn't get through to Mastertronic's customer support (got put on hold forever). Location 0 on my Amiga no longer has the string "GDOS", it is all 0's, I wonder if that made the problem go away. Sorry about the wrong information. -Jonathan