WELCOME TO THE JAM

Stupidly long gap between updates there, but that doesn’t matter. Today I’m here to show you something amazing, something you may just want to drop everything and play. Today, I’m here to tell you about “Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden”

Now, this game, this GEM, came out in early 2008, so you might have heard of it before, and that’s great, this post is now an excuse for you to pick it up and play it again! For everyone else, sit down and shut up, I’m about to bombard you with reasons to play this game while trying to be as spoiler free as possible, because you gotta go into this blind, you just gotta.

Get ready to slam

Somehow, a bunch of guys from an amateur game development board came together as the “Tales of Games” team when the planets were aligned or something and struck SOLID GOLD. Made as an unofficial sequel to Barkley Shut Up and Jam and Space Jam (Yes, that movie), you play as Charles Barkley, ex-NBA player in the ruins of Neo-New-York in the aftermath of the great B-Ball purge. This game is jammed to the brim with jokes about basketball, the internet, and video games. Between the enemies (B-BALL SPIDER), items (Tupperware armor), and status effects (Glaucoma) or the dating simulator (if you can find it) you will laugh out loud at least once when you play this, and not that laughing quietly to yourself bullshit people do when they use the acronym “LOL”, I mean actually laughing out loud.

Pictured: intense jamming in progress

Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden was made from the ground up to be both a parody of JRPGs, and a good game in its own right. For a parody game, the combat system, so named the B.A.B.B.Y system, is pretty good, keeping the battles from being boring by rewarding accuracy and timing and in some cases requiring multiple button presses. Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden is one of the most well known games made in Game Maker, and for good reason, people wouldn’t keep talking about it, and keep demanding a sequel and remixing other songs with the Space Jam theme song if it wasn’t great. This game is something you need to play, this game is something you need to keep on a flash drive so you can preserve it through the collapse of civilization. This game should make you look at yourself in the mirror and ask the big question: WHY ARENT YOU PLAYING THIS YET?

WELL? GET TO IT

You can get Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden over at http://www.talesofgames.com/barkley/