Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City (Super NES Review)

Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Released November 21, 1994
Designed by Amy Hennig
Developed by Electronic Arts
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

“You think I reach base often enough to perform the act of stealing additional bases? Kind of you to believe that.”

The greatest passion in my life isn’t video games or pinball. It’s basketball. It got its hooks into me as a little kid, 6 years old, and it never got old for me. I actually consider myself lucky that my team stunk back then. Golden State never won anything and never drafted the right players, and it was genuinely unfathomable we’d ever be a contender. Heh, who knew? But, it helped assure my loyalty is to the SPORT and not “my” team, and it’s stuck with me ever since. Before the Warriors started winning championships, the highlight of my basketball-watching life was getting to say I saw Michael Jordan, the greatest of all-time, play four times in person. We lost three of those four games, and in one of them, MJ only had 14 points, but it didn’t matter! I got to see over forty games a season, and the ones when Jordan played were completely different in every perceivable way. When his bald head emerged from the tunnel to shoot lay-ups before the game, everyone in the crowd literally gasped in awe. “That’s HIM!” like Jesus had just walked into the arena. I’ve gotten to see so many of the greats, from Shaq and Kobe to LeBron, Duncan, and yes, even our own Steph Curry. Crowds don’t just stare in starstruck awe at them. I’ll believe someone is the new G.O.A.T. when that happens again. Jordan was in a completely unique class, and I doubt that’ll ever happen again in my lifetime. Or, to put it another way, I’ll believe LeBron is on Jordan’s level when Electronic Arts builds a ridiculous platform game based solely around his stardom.

I don’t know why he bothers dribbling. Everyone knows MJ doesn’t get called for traveling.

Chaos in the Windy City is a completely ludicrous concept. But, the most insane thing about it is, holy crap, this is a pretty dang good game. Oddly enough, the franchise it shares the most DNA with is Ghouls ‘n Ghosts. Really! There’s some creepy-ass visuals in this one that really offset the silliness of this whole thing. Basketball monsters and.. uh, well, more basketball monsters, but seriously creepy ones. Fake basketball-themed items that turn into basketball monsters that then drop basketball-themed items when you kill them. Giants mutant basketball players. I’m frankly shocked the bats aren’t basketballs with wings. But, all the enemies are fun to do battle with. You have an unlimited supply of basketballs to throw at them, but there’s a huge variety of specialized balls that freeze enemies, set fire to the ground underneath them, ricochet off surfaces and multiply, and even ones that heat-seek. Ammo is rarely a problem, as there’s refills for all varieties scattered all over the sprawling levels. My one knock with the combat is you can’t really aim. It’s a basketball being thrown by Michael Jordan for god’s sake! You know how if someone is the best at something they say “they’re the Michael Jordan” of that sport? Well, Michael Jordan is the Michael Jordan of basketball BECAUSE HE IS MICHAEL JORDAN! I would think he’d be able to throw a basketball at something below his waist.

There’s a huge variety of basketball nets set up throughout the stages that dispense items when you dunk on them. No jump shots allowed, as if this were a Dr. J game. There’s two buttons for jumping in Chaos in the Windy City. One of them is a slam dunk button that’s used for a lot more than just dunking.

In order to kill enemies below your aim, you have to press the dunk button, then, well, there’s no other way to say it: you spike the ball into the ground. It’s incredibly silly looking, and very much immersion-breaking. The game isn’t really better for it, or more difficult, really. I died about a dozen times along the way and still finished with over forty lives. The lack of aim just slows the pace down, and that’s risky for this style of game. At its heart, Chaos in the Windy City is an exploration-based platformer. You’re searching the labyrinthine levels for a variety of keys. There’s silver and gold key rings that, once you have them, open every door with a matching padlock. Okay, so it’s super annoying you have to manually scroll through your collection of keys to select the right one instead of doors and buttons just working once you have them, but it is what it is. There’s also solo keys, which is where things sometimes get confusing. Occasionally you’ll see a lock symbol, and once you use the solo keys on them, you lose them. Well, one of those keys is gold, but it uses a totally different gold key than the ones on the golden key ring. Like, they couldn’t have used blue keys instead?

If you throw the ice balls at the floor, the floor freezes and it slows the enemies down. Of course, if you hit the enemies with the freeze balls twice, it kills them. In fact, I never found a single practical use for the whole “floor freeze” move.

What made Chaos make the leap from a decent novelty game into a truly fun experience is the level design. It’s always tough in games like this to arrange the different platforms, doors, elevators, and walls in a way where it doesn’t just feel like you’re a rat in a maze. I normally cite Virgin Games’ Disney output as the worst offender of unmemorable twisty-turny platforms that all feel samey. Chaos in the Windy City’s levels have a logic about them where, yes, they’re large and sprawling, but it rarely feels like you’re just going through the motions of making the same series of jumps over and over. Each of the main stages has a “captive” basketball player hidden in a door somewhere, and while you don’t need them, Chaos in the Windy City was good enough that I wanted to get a 100% completion and find them all. Some are so well-hidden that I occasionally had to replay stages to find them. The game is full of hidden pathways, breakable walls (and no, they don’t have any kind of marker, like Zelda’s cracks in rocks), and fake walls. You’ll want to throw basketballs at everything, including the floor, as sometimes the hidden pathways are underneath you. Sometimes, you even have to use the freeze balls to turn enemies into platforms. The exploration is just fantastic, even if the ending for finding all twenty-one captives isn’t really better. Actually, the ending sucks in general. The game just sort of ends. However, I did appreciate that, when you beat a boss, the victory animation is Jordan’s jumping fist-pump from THE SHOT.

The set-pieces keep getting better as you go along.

There’s just enough distractions along the way to make it all worth it. A surprisingly big variety of moving platforms, force fields, elevators, ladders, and even hooks to hang off of. You can still attack while on the hooks or ladders too, which I very much appreciated. The elevators are slightly annoying because of the button-pressing required to get on and off them, but then again, those levels were awesome mazes. I never got tired of dunking on the hoops along the way, and it really helps a lot that there’s a wide variety of Jordan signature dunks. You never know which one will happen on any given hoop. The four game worlds sound clichéd on paper, but they’re all properly creepy, capped off with a twisted haunted house theme that feels like Tim Burton meets Scooby-Doo. There’s five levels to each of the four worlds, plus a couple transition stages that take place on the famous Chicago L, and a one off “tunnel” stage right before the final world. While I do think that each of the four worlds could have probably subtracted one stage, hey, I had a smile on my face for all but an hour of gameplay. And I can identify that hour easily. I must have triggered some kind of glitch, because in the game’s penultimate stage, an enemy apparently did not drop a key for me that was necessary to finish the stage.

This is where it happened. I have no clue how. None.

I wish I had rewound the game to figure out exactly what happened here, because there was a giant mutant baddie that was supposed to drop the red key that unlocks the stage’s final door. I ran back through the stage multiple times throwing basketballs against every possible wall looking for it. Nothing. So I finally gave up and cued up the GameFAQs guide, then traveled to the spot in question. Where there was no enemy for me to kill in the first place, presumably because I already killed it. I couldn’t pause the game and press select to exit back to the map, like I did when I replayed levels to find the captives I’d missed. See, I hadn’t beat the stage yet. So, I killed myself on purpose, which respawns all the enemies, then made my way to the spot in question, and THIS TIME, the enemy dropped the red key. I want to say that I simply missed the pick-up the first time, except the keys don’t disappear when you scroll off the stage. Something must have happened, but what can you do? Send in a bug report for a 30 year old game? I mean, I DID do that for sh*ts and giggles. But, it shows that there is this weird haphazardness to the whole game. Which isn’t a deal breaker, by the way. This NEVER feels like a big AAA production, and it’s actually kind of charming for it, until something like that key thing happens.

The last boss is a gigantic robotic Michael Jordan who had the courtesy to wear a generic, cheap-looking white tank top with orange shorts instead of a #23 Bulls uniform. Hey, he may be an evil mad scientist who’s trying to.. uh.. do something evil, no doubt. BUT, he’s not about to pay a sports team rights fee for a platform game.

Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City sounds like a joke. It came out around the same time as Shaq-Fu, the horrible tournament fighter starring Shaquille O’Neal, which was about as critically acclaimed as smallpox. Now THAT game is a joke, literally. I think it’s supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek satire on tournament fighters. The problem is, unlike watching a parody movie like Airplane or Naked Gun, video game satires have to be played, and Shaq-Fu is the absolute pits. Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City is a similar satirical premise, only played with complete earnestness. “A platform game where you jump around as Michael Jordan, eating Wheaties and drinking Gatorade to restore your health while throwing hot and cold basketballs at various basketball-themed enemies.” When you put it like that, it just sounds like it’s going to be awful.

Only, it’s not at all. Rough around the edges? Sure. But it’s also unique, genuinely creepy, and undeniably fun. Of course, you have to actually play it to know that, and the pitch sounds so unpromising that many didn’t bother. Nobody in their right mind could call this one of the worst games ever, but people have. In 1997, the moronic staff of Nintendo Power, in their landmark 100th issue, declared Chaos in the Windy City the 7th worst video game ever made. Are you f*cking kidding me? Did they even play the game? I figured they lumped it in with Shaq-Fu, but actually, they put that #3. For the Michael Jordan game, they cited the “poor use of a license” for naming it as one of the worst video games ever made. Yea, who cares about gameplay. It’s a dumb idea, and all dumb ideas are bad games, right? Shame on all of them. Absolutely f*cking disgraceful. If they couldn’t name three worse games than Chaos in the Windy City, they had no business in the game industry.

Yes, that’s a Wheaties box. Wheaties and Gatorade ads are in this game, plus implied ads for Nike too. Mind you, this is before Space Jam made a joke of product placement.

Actually, Chaos in the Windy City is one of the most underrated games on the SNES, or ever, for that matter. The rare platform game that feels unlike anything else out there. Everything the genre needs is done right: breath-taking jumps, playful themes, memorable enemies, and satisfying combat. If I have to be critical, and I sort of have to, I’d say the controls aren’t very intuitive, the boss battles ALL suck, and there’s an overall roughness to the experience. The whole thing feels like it just barely functions right, which explains how that red key could pull a disappearing act. But, the level design, the dunking, the variety of weapons, and the well-implemented search for captive teammates elevate this to an elite status. This is a game that never stops being fun (unless it sh*ts the bed and forgets to drop a key for you). On a console defined by this very genre, Chaos in the Windy City stands out because there’s just nothing quite like it. It’s a silly theme and a bonkers premise, but I’ll be damned if it’s not one of the most entertaining 16-bit games I’ve reviewed yet.

To hit this switch, you have to take the purple basketball, do the dunk jump, slam the ball off the ground, ricochet under that gap in the wall, then ricochet off another wall. And it’s SO exhilarating to actually hit it.

It sucks that this game is remembered as a joke. When a major gaming publication says there’s only been six games ever worse than it, I can’t imagine why nobody gave this a try. In a just world, Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City would have been the start of a franchise. As far as unique, one-off games go, this feels like it really laid the foundation for something bigger and better. That roughness I complained about would have been ironed out with each passing sequel. I suspect there’s multiple reasons why the game airballed. It was released during Jordan’s baseball sabbatical. It was unheard of for a guy his age to retire in his prime, but Jordan was unheard of in general. Even haters probably thought “jeez, that’s it? It’s over?” I think it probably felt.. off, for lack of a better term, to have a basketball-themed game starring Michael Jordan launch in 1994. But, enough time has passed, and I hope EA takes a chance with a re-release of it, or even a remake.

Jordan plays for $10,000 a hole. You’d be better off staying captive.

Oh, it won’t happen. What really sucks is that fans demanded a sequel to Shaq-Fu, a joke game that was never good to begin with. They paid for it with crowdfunding, and then the game sucked because the original sucked. What did you expect? If these people are paying for a sequel to a terrible game, why even bother to make a decent game? No pressure, literally, because it’s a crowd-funded inside joke. Meanwhile, here’s a unique game with legitimate entertainment value that’s so damn silly that you can’t help but be charmed by it, but ain’t nobody stupid enough to remake it today. Nobody wanted it in the first place, and that’s sad because this is one of the best games on the SNES. Yep, I went there. It deserves one last dance.
Verdict: YES!