This is a full amateur game that's been making its rounds recently.. It was even featured on the 1UP Show (for hardcore gamers) so I was pretty suprised. It's a traditional RPG with a strong basketball theme set in neo-apocalyptic New York in the universe continuing after the Space Jam movie -- the main character is Charles Barkely and his other basketball homies.

It also is mischeviously meta and post-modern with all its poking itself on the hardcore gamer community and the JP vs Western tastes in gaming; with special mockery placed on gamers with elitist Eastern preferences in gaming. There are also homages to FFXII, Ultima and many other games alluded through the tasks and the crazy story..

Despite its cleverness, gameplay is EXTREMELY solid. Battles are not too easy, with each character having their own unique fighting styles and inputs. For example, you can use Barkely to shoot free throws (with a counter bar with a moving basketball where pressing it at the proper point = maximum damage) or do a normal shot by pressing up to make Barkely jump and releasing the key at the right time to make him shoot. The higher the jump, the more the damage.. etc. Every character has their own battle inputs and styles, making it pretty fun though initially taxing to learn. The puzzles in the game are pretty damn good; easy to get but never boring to do.

The graphics are a combination of rip-offs from various basketball games and such and pretty poor original art. There is an elaborate cutscene at the end that's very nice though. While the graphical style is sometimes disjointed and weak, especially with FLAT buildings and items that don't give a sense of three dimensional space, it still all works together nicely.

Music is very nice; quite a few are rips but I don't know about the rest. I thought it was excellent, despite the lack of variety of tunes.


Length is also nice, about 4-5 hours for me. Big recommendation : ) Sure makes me want to create my own game again, but I know it's a big task. Oh, and I think they used RPG Maker 6.1


Site Link: http://www.talesofgames.com/
Download Link: http://www.gamingw.net/forums/index.php?topic=68488.0

We should update v1 for modern windows and rebrand it as "verge classic" ;)