Hello, friends and Hive Gamers! So, in my quest to finish and review all 715 NES games, my first step into the wilderness came from a Backloggery Fortune Cookie. I was kinda hoping not to get a sports game or educational game for my first go, but we got Arch Rivals, a real "BasketBRAWL!"
Arch-Rivals is a standard two-on-two basketball game... featuring PUNCHING! Instead of just stealing the ball from other players, you punch them to the ground, causing them to lose the ball.
The game is an adaptation of Midway's arcade game, said to be a precursor to their later hit NBA Jam.
The game starts out with a ton of screens telling you how to play the game, which is nice. Interestingly, actions that use the B button such as passing or punching require you to hold the button for a moment and then release it. I never had much trouble passing, but punching seemed really finicky.
After watching the attract sequence, which was basically a few splash screens and a high score table, I pressed Start and was taken to the team select screen. The first player is always the white jerseys, so you don't get to select your team's color, unfortunately. The second team seems to be a random color between green, purple, blue, and red. I wanted to be a purple team...
And instead of getting to choose which team name you have, you press the B button and it randomizes the opponent's color and which team names are used for each team. The team names available seem to be Brawl State, Chicago, Natural High, and Los Angeles. Very strange lol.
After accepting which teams will be playing, you're presented with a player select screen. The opponent players and your partner player seem to be chosen at random. You can choose between one of eight players:
- Tyrone, the defensive giant
- Vinnie, a great player
- Hammer, the rebound king
- Moose, a real champ
- Reggie, the all-American
- Mohawk, tough & mean
- Blade, the crowd-pleaser
- Lewis, the top shooter
The game's manual even gives mini-biographies of the players! In fact, the manual overall is pretty silly and funny.
I decided to play as Hammer, the only player with facial hair. I mean, I am a Mustache Pod after all. Though his full beard is black and so is the background, making it blend in and almost look like a circle beard shudder.
Sadly being the "rebound king" didn't seem to help much, as rebounding is near impossible in this game. At least for me.
Also, interestingly, when you switch players, the little booklet at the bottom that shows their "bio" actually has a page-flipping animation. Pretty detailed for a simple NES game, honestly.
The game plays as you would expect it to -- the players vie to get the most points by scoring baskets, with baskets outside of the two-point zone being worth three points. While you have the ball, you can press A to shoot and B to pass (if your ally has the ball, you'll "play call" and tell them to do those things). On defense, you press A to jump block and B to PUNCH!!
There seem to be two major gimmicks that make it stand out from a generic basketball game, though.
The first of these is, of course, the punching. By holding down the B button, you can raise your fist, and releasing the B button with a sufficiently-raised fist will send out a punch. If your punch lands on an opponent, they'll fall to the ground and be stunned for a second. If they have the ball, they'll drop it, but you won't automatically recover it. You have to actually move to the ball.
Of course, the computer-controlled characters can do this flawlessly, but with the jank of the NES controls, sometimes it's hard to recover the ball yourself, and you'll be running in circles on top of the ball and then the opponent will just stand back up and recover it instantly. Quite frustrating. But after a while I kinda got the hang of knowing exactly how recovering the ball works. Definitely not intuitive, but doable.
The other mechanic that makes the game a little different is everyone's favorite addition to Super Smash Bros., tripping! There are garbage items that get thrown onto the court, and if you run over them in just the right way, you'll fall over and lose the ball as if you got punched. You can even trip over the tiny referee!
Of course, in all my time playing, I never saw the computer opponent trip over anything. But I did see my computer-controlled ally trip several times, and of course I tripped up a couple times myself. Oh, and I should mention that while the opponents are punching machines, I think in my three games I played, I saw my ally punch once. Fun.
You play a full four periods in the game, and between each one, you get a little intermission scene called Coach's Notes, presented by British Knights Athletic Footwear. You see some little hints on how to do better at the game, like having your opponent pass you the ball when you're open and other obvious stuff.
My first game as Hammer I lost 57 to 77. I felt like the game was unfair and impossible, with the computer constantly rebounding when it was hard for me, and them even making two half-court shots under pressure.
My second game, I played as Vinnie, because after all, he's "a great player!" I didn't see any play difference between the two characters, though. And I somehow did even worse -- this time losing 58 to 86, giving up more points than my first game while scoring about the same.
But by the end of the second game, I started to get the hang of a winning strat. Or rather, I got better at punching, so most of the time, as soon as the opponent started on offense, I could punch them and get the ball back right away. I didn't always capitalize on the opportunity and score, but it at least kept me scoring more than the opponent.
In fact, it was easier to score when the opponent started because I could punch them, grab the ball, and score right there. When we started, I had to make it all the way down the court with the ball, and the computer was very good at punching me.
Passing the ball seemed to be no good, as well, as the AI ally would randomly turn a lot (which slows you down compared to just running in a straight line) and then get punched. Or they'd run straight into a hazard and trip. The only thing the computer ally was good for was if they were open near the basket, then you could pass to them and play call a shot. If they were close enough, they'd often make the shot. But if you gave them enough time to move around, they were sure to blunder.
Even though I had gotten the hang of punching and retrieving the ball, I was still fighting for points (both figuratively and literally). I found myself getting pretty excited playing, with ups and downs as the game went on.
Finally after my third bout (this time playing as Moose, the "real champ") I managed to win the game. I got 76 points while keeping the opponent to only 66 -- fairly close, I would say.
After winning I got to put in my initials for the high score table. And fortunately for me, I got the #1 score for Moose! I was tied for 34 points at the top, with a bad shot percentage, but I'm guessing my high number of steals and rebounds is what let me be at the top of the board instead of SMP. Also the person in 4th was using the eyes emoji before emojis were even a thing 👀
It looks like there's a leaderboard for each character, so technically to "100%" the game, I should get top score with all 8... but there's no easy way to see the high score tables other than watching the attract sequence and hoping one shows up on the splash screens, so I figured getting a top score and winning a game, when that's about all you can do in the game, was well enough to consider this game completed. There didn't really seem to be any difference between the characters anyway.
In the end, Arch Rivals was surprisingly fun, and even when I "figured out" the punching, I still had to put in a good deal of effort to win. It seems like it would be a blast with two players, but alas I live far from my friends anymore. If I still lived with my brother, he would totally have played with me and I can imagine we'd have a grand time of it.
Not a terrible game by any means, definitely something I'd call a Midway "classic," and a good entry into anyone's NES collection, especially if you're a sports game fan.
And with that, we've completed our first game! Thanks to everyone who's joined me on the ride so far. Up next is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which I'm a little afraid of...