Shadow Puppet Disco - Slam Dunk

Alex used to have a t-shirt that was a letter to Tom explaining to him the rules of basketball. I'm still left with some many questions about this t-shirt. Had Tom had been living under a rock or just woken up from a coma that he had never heard anything about basketball in his life? Why would you end a letter inexplicably with "slam dunk?" If Tom has never heard of basketball before, how is he going to know what a slam dunk is? If you could think of any adjectives in the world to describe basketball, why would non-violent be your first choice? How do Tom and Dan know each other? Why did Dan choose a short letter as the best format to tell Tom about basketball? Why didn't he try to elaborate more to get him excited about basketball like tell him about the strategy or his favorite players? Did Tom ever make it to a basketball game? What does Tom think about basketball now after reading this letter? Are Tom and Dan still friends now? What was Tom's final grade in AP Calculus? Does Alex still wear this shirt? Does Alex still think this song was pretty good? Who was the mysterious masked man appearing on the back of the long lost SPD album? What if God was one of us? Who put the Al in Alabama? Where do babies come from?

Despite all of these questions, we definitely have something that resembles a non-violent song here. Martin plays a little ditty on the keyboard before eventually going into a very repetitive tune where I read Alex's t-shirt. I remember we just thought this t-shirt was ridiculous and wanted to incorporate it into an SPD song. I think we probably put a total of like a minute and a half of preparation into creating this song before we recorded it. But this might be the most famous song ever about a t-shirt. Can you think of a more famous one?

An Exemplar Example of a Best Man's Wedding Toast

William, as the best man at my upcoming wedding, I thought you might be looking for an example of the kind of wedding toast I am looking for. This clip illustrates a wedding toast where everything is done perfectly, even a temperature of one's own choosing:

https://youtu.be/9tO2zVCvN10?t=22m9s

Another BLCB Video

I know you all have been missing the quality Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball content over the past few days, so I am going to keep it rolling with this truly special video.

Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball Video of the Week

To help celebrate Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball Week and because I wanted to figure out how to create video footage of SNES games, I present to you this video of me playing a game of violent cyborg basketball.What out for the numerous times I unintentionally throw the ball out of bound, get unjustified back-court violations, jump up for no reason and run into bombs. All this and I couldn't even make a single basket!!

Why I Love Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball

As all of you know from those occasions where I have forced you to play it with me, Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball for SNES is a terrible game. One button is used to both shoot and pass causing you to frequently throw the ball out of bounds when you don’t mean to. The graphics look plain, pale and more of the quality of something from the NES than the SNES. Gameplay is slow and awkward, since even once you have mastered the controls (as much as they could be) often times the best thing to do is simply throw the ball down the court and hope one of your teammates might catch it before it rolls out of bounds. Scoring a basket feels more like luck than an accomplishment. Most egregious of all though, the game is just boring from the sluggish controls to the repetitive game play, once you have played long enough to get over the initial awkwardness of the whole experience, you’ve done everything there is to do.

Although as a child this game was really my only exposure to this idea, for some reason there were numerous sports game made in the 80s and 90s, most notably Super Baseball 2020, where futuristic robots (some of the art makes them look like cyborgs or something, but in game they look like robots) played instead of humans. With little explanation as to why he is the only human hanging out with a bunch of futuristic robots, this game used basketball bad boy Bill Laimbeer to legitimize the combat elements of the game because apparently this was his dream of how basketball should be played or something. Bill Laimbeer was a star player for the Detroit Pistons known essentially for being a dick. He frequently fouled other players and fought with referees. So Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball brings violence, (if you can call robots pushing each other over violence) robots, and celebrity together in a way that I don’t know has ever been done before or since.

My first exposure to this game was playing it at my friend Wes’s house. He got a SNES before we did and along with it a few games Super Mario World, some weird game with the superscope and Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball. Since we only had these handful of games to play and eventually we got bored of Super Mario World, we ended up playing a lot of Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Baskebtall. I was so excited to be playing the SNES during those times and part of my love of this game is relieving that excitement.

However, it goes beyond that too. Much overlooked in its terrible gameplay, Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball had interesting strategic elements in its campaign mode where you started with a team of lousy robots and as you won more games and won more money, you got to upgrade to better robots. This part of the game was fairly simple, but I remember loving this simple combination of strategy (you had to decide what kind of robots to buy-faster ones, good shooters, etc.) with the addictive ability to gain incremental progress towards making your team better. Although it has a ridiculous amount more depth, Out of the Park Baseball, one of my favorite game series of all time, has similar core elements where you are trying to strategically improve your team.

I guess it’s mostly nostalgia, since I generally have little tolerance for such terrible games, but something about this game speaks to me. It’s bad, but with a strangeness all its own. I like the fact that you are playing something so unpolished where you have to figure out how to win despite the glitches and awkwardness. Much like many people like to watch old, campy science fiction movies with silly looking special effects, I like that Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball contains such a bizarre combination of elements and has that same kind of rushed, shoe-strong budget feel of these campy old movies. I see so much potential in all of this quirkiness as if, in some kind of alternate universe where this game was well polished with better graphics, it would have been a cult classic talked about for years to come. Instead it is something more on par with Yor Hunter from the Future. If only you could also play combat basketball with cavemen . . .

Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball

So there has been a disturbing trend of a distinct lack of Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball content on our blog recently. So, to fix this, I present you with a glorious first time playthrough . . .



Hopefully this will be the start of a glorious Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball theme week!!!