Run N Gun, by
Konami is one of the
greatest
arcade basketball games i have ever had the
enjoyment of
waste numerous hours on. What makes it great (in my
XP) is not its fairly
uninteresting single player mode, but the two (or four!) player head-to-head mode. A
friend of mine and I found this arcade
machine where we
work, and we played it for months and months... unfortunately beating up the
controls numerous times.
It has all of the elements of a great basketball game, no penalties, real teams, somewhat realistic physics, and a great
3dish mode 7 perspective that helped you to see where the players were. But our favorite part of the game was the last-ditch, at-the-buzzer hail mary three point shot. If for some reason, you were down a few
points, and you had the ball at the end of a quarter (and this helped at the end of the match numerous times) you could throw it up in the air, and there would be a huge chance that it would go in it it was the last shot you could get off. It was awesome. In retrospect, it was one of
my favorite features of the game, since he lost numerous times to that, but still, it made for some heated match-ups. It was a bit buggy some times, and the hit detection is kind of weird at times, but thats the sort of thing that you only notice if you've started at something forever. Now and again you could get a 3 pointer when your foot was over the line, or something could make two entire block attempts to your dunk, but hey, it just gave us
fodder to complain over as to why we
lost afterwards.
We became very good at the game, and mastered the diffical arts of
stealing and rejecting other people's shots. It was great. Of course our mad
skills were all for nothing when the employment there ended (totally unrelated to the amount of time spent playing arcade basketball), but still, it was an awesome time.
All in all, it gets a high number for enjoyability and replay value, two of the things that make games into
classics.