C64: Omni-Play Basketball Dynasty

[larrymcg421]

Back in the mid-to-late 80s, I spent countless hours playing games on the Commodore 64. I have fond memories of titles such as Journey to the Center of the Earth (never did find all the treasures) Jumpman, Miner 2049er, Wargame Construction Set, Raid on Bungeling Bay, and tons of others. However, none of them topped the addictiveness and originality of Omni-Play Basketball. This was the first game I ever saw that featured a career play format (although the same company had released Superstar Soccer and Superstar Ice Hockey earlier) and eventually led to my current fixation with text sports sims.

Omni-Play Basketball was not actually a text game, as the games were still played out arcade style (although you could choose to sit on the sidelines and coach). However, the unqiue gameplay was completely different from anything else at the time. Instead of actually controlling the movements of your players, you only controlled the movement of the ball. The players moved on their own, but the cool part was they did so in a way that allowed you to figure out which strategies to use. It became important to know when that forward is gonna break inside or how to dish it at the right time to your shooting guard when your point guard is double teamed. After playing for a while, you were able to see when the player was gonna make those moves.

Still, the most important aspect of the game were career/managerial functions. The game is set up in a 24 team league, with similar cities to the NBA and team strengths representing the mid-80s (i.e. the Lakers and Celtics will almost always meet in the finals that first year). You have the option of starting in one of the four divisions as a bottom feeding team that needs to rebuild. You are given a budget (called trading points) and have the option of training to improve your current players, trading to swap for a better player, or recruiting to develop a new youngster. At the end of each season, you received more trading points in inverse proportion to how well you played. This made it difficult to sustain a dynasty, but also allowed you to build a great team if you tanked the first few seasons. The latter trick led to my first ever house rule: I had to try and win every game.

In honor of this legendary game, I decided to do a dynasty for it utilizing a Commodore 64 emulator known as Vice. Along the way, I'll introduce you to the various aspects of the game, and you'll be able to follow along via screenshots.

[larrymcg421]

And now, in a brief tribute to the creators of this game, here is the credits page:

After that, you come up to this creative copy protection scheme:

So yeah, if you lost the manual you were screwed. Hilariously, later versions of the game included a card with all the answers on it. I'm not sure why, but maybe they got too many complaints.

[larrymcg421]

I guess I should discuss the various formats that the game offered.

End View - This is the format that I described, where you control the ball movement but not the player movement. End View refers to the camera viewpoint. You could only see a half court at a time. While somewhat limiting, this actually made it more playable and challenging. It could become quite a struggle getting the ball across the half court line unless you had the right players in place.

Side View - This format allowed you to control the movement of one player - the Center. You had limited ball control movement. The other four players would make their own decisions, but you could call for the ball yourself and they always obliged. I never liked this format. You could beat it easily by getting a very fast center and outrunning everyone to the hoop. Also, the game just did not flow as well as it did in End View.

SBA - This simply refers to the fictional league which is modelled on the Pros and was the league included in the original game.

College - I never did play College when I had the original game, although it appears to be pretty interesting. It allows you to play out the NCAA tournament as any of 64 teams. However, there was no career play involved, which would have been quite cumbersome for the Commodore 64.

Pro - As far as I know, there was never any Pro version released. If there was, none have popped up as a playable disk image.

Fantasy/Print - These were meant as tools for rotisserie owners, but I don't believe either were ever released.

[larrymcg421]

When starting a new game, you are presented with various options.

Number of Human Teams: You could have up to two different players in the same universe. I only had limited experience doing this, but it seemed to work out fine. Obviously, I'll be doing one for this dynasty.

Team Name: You were allowed to come up with your own team name. I picked Palm Bay, which is my hometown and the team I used to always play with.

Choose your Division: You could select which division you wanted to be a bottomfeeder in. I always pick Eastern Conference Division 1, which contains a very tough Boston team.

Number of Minutes Per Quarter: You pick between 3, 6, 9, or 12. The game actually works best with 3 minute quarters. This way the individual games don't take too long to play out. Also, it is very challenging because you only get an 18 second shot clock, meaning you have to decide very quickly on who is gonna take the shot.

Number of Games Per Season: Honestly, I always picked 16 games simply because I was a big football fan. No matter how good I got, I never could manage an undefeated season. Sometimes the shots just don't fall.

Length of Playoff: There are three playoff rounds. Top two teams in each division qualify. First round is between the two division teams, second round is the conference championship, and then you have the finals. You can set each round to 1, 3, or 5 games length. Since this is only a 16 game season, 1 game makes the most sense. It will also make it more difficult for me to dominate.

[larrymcg421]

And here is the main SBA League screen.

View League History - This screen shows you the overall record for every team in the league over the last 9 seasons. After you pass 9 seasons, it begins to erase data each season that you continue.

View a Team History - This shows you records and stats for individual teams over the last 9 seasons. Unfortunately, the stats are only collected for games that are played out. It was still a nice feature, as you could at least track the progress of your players.

Team Records - This is one of the coolest features. Team records are saved no matter how many seasons you play. The game tracked team and individual records for players in all the usual categories, except for assists, which I guess were too hard to for the program to track.

Improve Team - This is where you can trade, recruit, and improve players. We'll get into more detail on these options shortly.

Reset the League - This is where you go when you want to start a whole new career.

Show Previous Games - This simply shows you the results of the previous week's games. What's cool is that the game would generate scores based on the length of quarters you selected, something a certain football game was unable (or unwilling) to do many, many, many years later.

O.M.N.I. - This takes you back to that intro screen with the big freaky severed hand.

Play Next Game - This is where you could play the next scheduled game, or an exhibition game if you preferred. The next scheduled game is denoted by the two flashing teams in different colors.

[larrymcg421]

Players are rated in four different categories:

O (Outside): This simply refers to the players ability to shoot from a distance, specifically from the 3 pt line. Players with lower than a 5 should never shoot 3 pointers.

I (Inside): This refers to the players ability to score when close to the basket. This is a very important rating. Players with lower than a 5 will miss the easiest layups and dunks, even if theyre all alone under the basket.

C (Control): This is kind of a general stat that means many different things. It refers to ball handling in the sense that it's very hard for the ball to be stolen from you with a high control rating (this will lead to a foul from the other player). Likewise a high control player will have great success at stealing the ball without picking up fouls. Low control players will get into foul trouble frequently, and will often commit one of the most amusing fouls in the game: breaking the glass on a dunk.

S (Speed): This is obviously how fast your player is. This is by far the most important stat for Guards. There is no point in playing a guard with less than a 7 in speed, as you will suffer far too many turnovers by getting trapped in the backcourt, no matter how high his control rating.

[Wolfpack]

Such memories. I played the heck out of all of the SportTime series games. Great stuff for the time period.

[larrymcg421]

Originally Posted by Wolfpack

Such memories. I played the heck out of all of the SportTime series games. Great stuff for the time period.

I never could get into the Hockey game, but Superstar Soccer was a blast. I'll have to do a dynasty for that after this one.

[Wolfpack]

Yeah, hockey was tough to play because you always ended up going slower than molasses after a while.

I abused the heck out of the MISL game because I had figured out the perfect goal shooting spots (usually down to the bottom on a hard angle.). For whatever reason, the keeper had difficulty stopping those shots.

The only complaint I had about the game was the fact that I could never really get the rookie thing to work very well. I tried to do it but always gave up in favor of spending trading points to get some big fish from another team. Everything was a one-for-one trade, so if you shelled out enough points, you could significantly strengthen your team at the expense of another team. Still had to hope the trade was accepted, though.

[larrymcg421]

Originally Posted by Wolfpack

Yeah, hockey was tough to play because you always ended up going slower than molasses after a while.

I abused the heck out of the MISL game because I had figured out the perfect goal shooting spots (usually down to the bottom on a hard angle.). For whatever reason, the keeper had difficulty stopping those shots.

The only complaint I had about the game was the fact that I could never really get the rookie thing to work very well. I tried to do it but always gave up in favor of spending trading points to get some big fish from another team. Everything was a one-for-one trade, so if you shelled out enough points, you could significantly strengthen your team at the expense of another team. Still had to hope the trade was accepted, though.

The problem with the rookie system is that you couldn't train individual player in the soccer game. You had to train the entire team, which usually ended up being a waste of points.

The easiest way to build a team was to spend all of your points for the very best CF in the game, which will allow you to run circles around everyone and scores 15+ goals a game (although you'll have trouble int he cup against good teams because your goalie sucks)., Then even when you promote, you still get the trading points of the 48th ranked team. You could usually use this to buy a premiere goalie and a couple of solid wingers/defenseman.

It did become quite difficult to score against those Division 1 Goalies, though.

[astrosfan64]

This brings back memories. Keep em coming.

[larrymcg421]

Here's the initial team I am stuck with:

Each team has Two Centers, 4 Forwards, 4 Guards, and 2 Reserves. Reserves can play any position.

Center: Hinkley is a guy I can work with. I'll immediately focus on making him a huge presence inside. Cox is worthless and just taking up bench space for the time being. Boswell might get some backup duty here.

Forward: Rich is a nice outside threat, but I'll have to keep him away from the paint. Keans is a nice all-around player, but I'm really lacking a big man here. Gardner and Sears are worthless.

Guards: Brown and Black are ancient so they will tire very quickly (players will tire four times faster than in a 48 minute game, so you still have to worry about that no matter what length you select.) Thankfully, I have a good young reserve in McGill, who can easily be trained up in Speed. Melvin and Eliot are pathetic. One of them will be replaced with a youngster.

As you problably noticed, we're viewing this on the training screen. Training is pretty simple in this game. It costs 25 trading pts for each individual skill improvement. You can only train two skills per player, and they must be from different skill pairings. As you can see, Outside/Inside are listed together, and Control/Speed are listed together. You can only improve one from each group.

In your first season, you start off with 250 trading points to spend, which really isn't a whole lot. I decide that I want to save 50 pts for my rookie, so I'll spend 200 points to improve Hinkley's Inside rating to an 8 and McGill's Speed to a 9.

[larrymcg421]

Here is the Recruit a player screen, where you can bring in rookies. The quality of a rookie depends on how many points you wish to spend. You can start him with up to a 5 skill in each postition pairing. If you plan on training this player later, it is best to max out the skills you wish to train here. In recruiting, it only costs 10 trading pts. per skill level, while in training it costs 25 pts.

When you bring in a rookie, you have to name him and then pick who he will replace. I decide to replace Eliot since Melvin at least has some Control and will make better trade bait since he's younger. The player I decide to bring in is none other than Black's son! I spend my remaining 50 pts. giving him a 5 in speed and look forward to training him up to 9 next season.

[larrymcg421]

I don't have any points left to make a Trade with, but I thought I'd give you a glimpse of the Trading screen:



To attempt a trade, you click on the View Teamns button and you can scroll through all the teams in the league. When you find a player you want to trade for, you hit the Try Trade button.

Each trade costs 50 pts to petition the league for approval. On top of that, you may sweeten the deal by offering extra Trading pts. to the team you are trading with. The league will notify you the likelihood (in % format) of success. At this point you can back out, but will only receive 25 of the 50 pts back. If you proceed with the trade, you will lose the 50 pts whether it is accepted or not.

[larrymcg421]

Here's the Play Game screen:



Another one of the cool options about the game is the ability to change colors. You can change your uniform and/or court colors to come up with the best looking colors for gameplay. I usually leave the court colors as is, but change my team uniform to black.

As for the Control section, you can set whether you want to control the Players or Coach the team. If you choose no for both, the game will give you the option of a quick sim or you can watch the game. For this dynasty, I will be coaching and controlling the players.

Under the Rules section, you can set it to whether you wish to play a League or Exhibition game. In League games, the shot clock is dependent on the length of quarters you select, but in exhbition games, you can customize it however you like.

[larrymcg421]

You get to choose strategies from four different categories:

Offensive Rebounding: Hit the Boards or Protect Fast Break

I always select Hit the Boards here. I want those second chance opportunities. My team is so slow I doubt we could stop a fast break even if we gameplanned for it.

Offensive Playmaking: Work Inside, Normal, or Work Outside

Normal is the best strategy to use if you have a good mix of scorers from the Inside and Outside. However, I want to start off by getting Hinkley going in the 1st quarter. I'll switch to Normal every now and tghen to get Rich some opportunities. Work Outside should only be used when you need a quick three.

Defensive Rebounding: Hit the Boards, Foul, Setup Fast Break

There would be no point in setting up a fast break. Even if my guards could pull it off, the rest of the team would be lagging behind. Foul is used late int he game when you are losing.

Defensive Playmaking: Expect Inside, Normal, Try Steal, Expect Outside

My standard strategy is Expect Outside. The way it works is if the opponent tries outside, you'll be right in his face. If the opponent goes Normal or inside, then they'll be running into your very physical players. This could lead to alot of Fouls with a low Control team, so I'll have to watch that. Try Steal should be used when the opponent has slow guards in the game.

You have more options when you don't control the players, as you'll need to tell them whether to work the clock or take a quick shot. This obviously isn't necessary when you control the ball.

[Radii]

awesome! I played the side view game forever on the Atari 800.

[larrymcg421]

Game 1: Palm Bay vs. Newark

Newark gets off to a fast start by hitting a three after being fouled and converting the 4 pt play. We work ourselves back into the game by some strong inside play by Hinkley. We enter the 4th quarter with a 12-10 lead. Newark takes the lead back with a 3 pointer with 2:20 left to play. This is when we got hot. Rich nailed a 3 pointer on the next possession. After a NEwark miss we came back down the court and I let Keans take a rare 3 pointer because he's wide open, and swish! We now had a 16-13 lead. On Newark's next possession Keans comes up with a steal and hits a jump shot to give us an 18-13 lead. Newark would not get any closer than 5 the rest of the game and we walk away with a 20-15 victory.

Here are some screenshots from the victory.

Hinkley is a powerful force inside. Here he is with a dunk in traffic:



A wide open Rich launches a three, although he would miss this one:



This is what happens when you break the backboard:



And here are the game stats:

[larrymcg421]

Week 1 Results:

[larrymcg421]

Game 2: Palm Bay vs. Washington

The backups came alive in this one. After no bench points against Newark, it was nice to see Cox, Boswell, and Gardner all get on the board. Hinkley was even better than last week, and led us on a 13-2 run to start the game. Each time Washington mounted a run, it was silenced by a Rich 3 pointer or a Keans steal, and we coasted to a 24-16 victory.

Hinkley doing what he does best:

[larrymcg421]

Week 2 Results:

[larrymcg421]

Palm Bay vs. New York

We really struggled in this one. Rich had an abysmal game, going 0-10 from the field and missing both of his free throw attempts. Thankfully, despite our sluggish offensive display, NEw York couldn't really get anything going either. They led throughout, but not by much. In the 4th quarter, we made a concerted effort to get the ball to Hinkley inside on every single play. This strategy was working and we turned a 13-10 4th quarter deficit into a 17-15 lead. That is when this happened:



Yikes! So we tried to play the rest of the game without our star player. Predictably, New York took the lead and Rich's poor shooting continued. After Rich fouled out, New York hit two free throws to take a 20-17 lead. With time for one more shot, I went to my best three point shooter left (Keans) and he drills it at the buzzer to send the game into OT. Unfortunately, it turned out that OT was just prolonging the inevitable. Both teams played sloppy again, but New York had a 23-22 lead with 9 seconds left. I'm able to get the ball to my backup Center Boswell all alone underneath the basket, but he misses a layup at the buzzer.

The real tragedy of this game is that Hinkley will be out for the next game, which happens to be against Boston. I expect to get creamed.

[larrymcg421]

Week 3 Results:

[larrymcg421]

Here is a screenshot showing Boston's skills compared to ours. It's gonna be pretty tough. All of their guards are fast, and the forwards are incredibly well rounded. The only good sign is that Price will be out for 5 games. But they can withstand an injury alot better than we can.