Retro Monday – Michael Jordon: Chaos in the Windy City

Michael Jordon: Chaos in the Windy City, was a Super Nintendo Entertainment System game that came out in 1994 and was made by Electronic Arts and as usual in the EU it came out in 1995 and was published by Ocean.

Yet again it’s a Retro Monday where the game in question I haven’t played, honestly, I haven’t even heard of it until it was put in the thread for people to vote on. MJ: CitWC is an action-platformer where you take the role of the titular basketball star and Make your way through varying levels trying to rescue your teammates who have been abducted by the Evil Dr. Max Cranium, to what ends I don’t know. I only got to the 3rd part of the Dungeon levels, so didn’t get very far,  but I did get the gist of the game from my brief time with it.

You run and jump through stages, with a basketball taking out the enemies, which are zombies, spiders and other things. Did I mention that the Zombies heads have been replaced with basketballs? It’s a cool twist with the zombies taking their ball heads off and throwing them at you. There are other cool touches like baskets being throughout the levels that you can slam dunk your ball into that will do various things like, clear the enemies, give you coins, or power-ups. Talking power-up’s, they seem to be different types of balls, you can get ones that home in on enemies, or split into 3 balls, or even a bowling ball which seems to kill enemies in 1 hit. The game is actually pretty decent, it’s not a bad game at all, but where I was enjoying it at first, by the time my hour was up, I had grown bored of the game. There is nothing inherently wrong with it, but something didn’t quite mesh right. It has the makings of a good platformer, but the levels I played were a little bland in their design.

The levels and sprites all look OK, they’re neither good nor bad, and Michaels animation seems fine to me. The problem is I didn’t get to get out of the one area, so I don’t know how much variety there is in the visuals being as I saw only the dank looking dungeon area. Musically, the game is ok, it does its job, but is ultimately forgettable and a little tiresome after some time. I thnk it’d be worth looking into the game, and maybe with more varied later stages, my interest would come back.

Verdict: Neutral.