So, I changed my mind.
After completing the previous post on the second helping of early BASIC games, I couldn't help but mull over in my mind overnight whether PDP 10 Timesharing Basketball was enough of a game to throw a review score at it. I went over my metrics in my head over and over again, and determined this morning that I can, in fact, give it a score. It won't be a good score, but it passes enough metrics to make it worthy of one.
PDP 10 Timesharing Basketball (1967)
Release Date: May, 1967
Platform: PDP-10
Genre: Sports
Developer(s): Charles Bacheller
Publisher(s): DECUS
I'll first start with the metrics that don't apply to it. Sound and Story are all not applicable, as it has no sound and no narrative. That's a fairly standard exclusion list for text games, meaning that the total score is out of 70 for this one.
Time Played: 20 minutes (an individual game can take anywhere between 3 - 5 minutes)
Difficulty: 2
It's fairly negligible as far as challenge is concerned, especially as it mostly comes down to luck.
Game Design: 2
While I can appreciate it providing different offense and defense options, they mostly become moot when the outcomes are mostly left to luck. It's very tricky to grade games that rely almost entirely on RNG. Ultimately, the fatal flaw of the game is that it feels a lot like my choices have no impact on the outcome whatsoever. That's a cardinal sin as far as I'm concerned.
Controls: 9
It's very hard to rate controls on a text-based game. I have to go by how simple and logical the inputs are to execute. By that logic, this rates extremely highly, as the inputs are mostly single-digit integers. What's not making sense to me is the decimal inputs. All of the game's choices fit neatly within 0 - 9, so having the decimal inputs seems completely unnecessary, unless I'm missing some reason why that wouldn't work in BASIC. It's a fairly minor gripe, all things considered.
Visual: 2
The formatting of the instructions is a mess, to be plainly honest. It's a mess of numbers, parentheses and punctuation that could've been easily broken up into easily readable lines. For the most part, the rest of the text formatting is fine; each play is broken up with a blank line in between. Sometimes this isn't the case, and the formatting gets messy again with "your shot?" not being on its own line as it normally is.
The writing within the game is very dry and matter-of-fact; effectively devoid of personality in the play-by-play commentary. There's also couple of typos, with "alignment" being spelled with one-too-many Ls, and "Man-to-man" lacking the second hyphen.
On the positive, I appreciate how it clearly defines the "end of first half/game" with the use of asterisks.
Functionality: 4
There's one small quirk, where if you type in an invalid number when asked for your starting defense, the game will skip the naming of the opposing team, leaving it blank for the remainder of the game. Otherwise, the game appears to work as intended.
Accessibility: 3
Text-based games are almost always going to score low on the accessibility metric, particularly in this modern era where graphics are king. That being said, this one is pretty easy to get into due to its simplicity, and doesn't require much reading proficiency to understand, either.
Fun Factor: 2
The dependence on probabilities devalues the playing experience quite significantly when you feel like your choices don't have any material impact on gameplay. It honestly discourages me from playing the game, and I don't want to come back to it at all. I did find myself wanting to come back to win during my first try of the game, so that's at least something this game has going for it. I enjoyed the second, third and fourth games more than the first, but after coming back to it later, it lost almost all appeal.
That gives PDP Basketball a total score of 23/70, or 28.75%. This puts it in the middle of the E tier. Ouch. It's really not a good game, but it is from 1967, and everyone's still figuring out this video game stuff, so we shouldn't be surprised that the earliest games available aren't that good.
[Add.] Upon doing the rescore article, I realised I made an error with the percentage calculation. 23/70 should have been 32.85%, not 28.75%. I apologise for this error, but the game has since been rescored to a 21/70, or 30.00%
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