If there was any game ever that bamboozled me to the point of craziness it's Slam City. Many attempts were made by me to leave dents into the street ballers in this game to pretty much no avail. Battletoads? Piece of cake. Atlantis no Nazo on Famicom? Potentially maybe? Slam City with Scottie Pippen? Can't fuckin' do it, goddamn impossible.

This is because this is an FMV 1-on-1 basketball game that basically boils down to you having to analyze the live-action footage to the point of instantly recognizing what clip is being played, and responding with the quickness of Barry Allen to do what is required to make it past your opponent's guard or to have a smidgen of a chance to stop their onslaught upon your poor backboard. This is made worse by the incredibly uneven difficulty of your four main opponents you choose via which of the four discs you put into your Sega CD. Fingers and Mad Dog actually almost feel well-suited to what the game is trying to accomplish with it's "tell-based" gameplay as Fingers actually visibly goes to block in directions to tell when to get past him, and Mad Dog is constantly speaking to at least clue you in better. Meanwhile Smash doesn't like talking and barely makes visible tells, and Juice may as well be unbeatable in the standoff due to never leaving her stance and staying as silent as the night.

Your only hopes are turning on the "training" option and looking up the guide on GameFAQs that actually tells you what to do which the training option neglects on, as it only shows "break" on either the left or right side of the screen with little context. On offense it actually helps a bit once you know that you need to actually be on the very left or right sides of the screen to make your way past the opposing player, but on defense it may as well barely exist as you'll still find your opposition sometimes just instantly blowing past you with zero warning like they're Sonic the Hedgehog. You also get zero "respect" (points) while you're on "training", meaning it's actually impossible to play against Scottie Pippen without becoming an undisputed master at playing Where's Waldo with the details in Slam City with Scottie Pippen. At the very least you could potentially just play against Fingers and Mad Dog constantly, but then it exposes how horrifically repetitive it all is.

The term "trial and error" gets thrown around a ton, but Slam City may as well be the epitome of that, because the game is basically unbeatable without any knowledge on it at all, and mandates needing to play it for god knows how long and memorize every possible clip and when exactly to respond accordingly unless you're some kind of omniscient superbeing with the luck and timing of Buddha. Mike Tyson's Punch-Out is a tell-based game, but you can still potentially beat it without knowing where all the star punch opportunities are, and if it took lessons from Slam City then the tells would be shit like noticing when a pixel is slightly off-center from Super Macho Man's sprite just to land one punch on him.

It's a shame too, because after about the seventh time I attempted to beat any of the opponents after finally breaking my own stubbornness and busting a guide open I kinda had some fun with it once I started actually scoring points due to the corny dialogue from people at courtside, and John Baker's music is pretty cool even if it's a step down from his ToeJam & Earl work. I still believe it's the grand poobah of exemplifying why FMV was such a shitty trend during this time, but damn is it still not charming as all hell.