Arcade Archives: Punk Shot
May. 9th, 2025 10:50 amThis week's Arcade Archives release is... Punk Shot (Konami, 1990)
PSN
EU
US
Switch
EU
US
The Japanese, International (two-player) and International (four-player) ROMs are included. Preference Settings allow players to adjust game speed and, for all versions except International (two-player), select which player side they want to use.
Only one rule on this court- no rules! It's just a little two-on-two street basketball with Stallion (1P) and Basher (2P) as the Ramblers versus their hated rivals, Hair (3P) and Spike (4P) as the Slammers on courts across the city. While it looks like normal basketball with all the long-shots and slam-dunks you can handle and has a fairly-simple control scheme that changes depending on whether you're on offense or defense, there's a few wrinkles here for something a little more violent. For a start, when you don't have the ball, there's no fouls, so you can punch and even suplex your opponent to get possession back! Each of the courts- from the park to the harbour to downtown- also has obstacles like brooms, banana peels and fires, and you can even fall in the drink and get stuck in a shipping crate!
At this point in time, Konami had a few basketball games under their belt- 1984's Super Basketball and 1988's Double Dribble- but they were pretty traditional aside from using a 'dribble' button to actually move with the ball. Punk Shot, though, is definitely more inspired by Midway's 1989 basket-brawl Arch Rivals (Punk Shot was a late 1990 release according to arcade-history, so this makes sense) with a focus on hazard-littered courts and player-on-player violence. It's mostly fine, I think I prefer Arch Rivals but this has its own charm with really great presentation and some funny touches like the crowd and the way you leap forward to suplex opponents. The main complaint I've got is that there's a few things that slow the game down, especially in the harbour court where a shipping crate can completely stop play until it's destroyed (as well as squashing the player, it traps the ball inside) which somewhat ruins the flow you might be in. Otherwise, this is a neat little variant on basketball, although everything I've said here only really applies to the Japanese version.
... That's because the International version might be one of the most over-the-top Konami 'adjustments' to an arcade game I've ever seen, even more extreme than XEXEX. The manual of this version fortunately goes over the differences in a lot of detail, but in a nutshell, the International version divides the game into quarters like traditional basketball, meaning one 'game' will go on for a lot longer... In theory. In practice, each human player now has a health meter that slowly drains as you play and also decreases when your opponent hits you or scores points, but can be very slightly refilled when you score points yourself. There is absolutely no way to play well enough to keep this ever-draining health topped up to last a quarter, let alone an entire match. Arcade sports games are a bit tricky to balance right- some games like Arch Rivals and Baseball Stars 2 just have a timer letting you buy money, but Punk Shot is especially mean about it because it pretends that you have a chance of playing a little longer, but you get so little health back from scoring that inevitably your meter will empty, and when that happens..


... Your player keels over and dies on the court (you can only see this if you're in a multiplayer game, though, otherwise the game abruptly stops to ask for more money). If you don't continue, you get taken off the screen on a stretcher and replaced with a CPU player.
Told you this was a rough court!