Double Dribble is a helluva hoops game, despite its multitude of flaws. By today’s bajillion-polygon, fully-rendered standards, Double Dribble is, well, a festering dung heap. The graphics are crudely drawn and there’s only a hint of what anyone would classify as animation applied to the mere three members of each basketball team. It’s about as close to stop-motion animation that you can get without looking like the California Raisins.

Double Dribble lacks an official NBA license, but in its place, are a handful of teams representing the big four markets: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Now that I think of it, does four of anything qualify as “handful” status? I know that my hand can house at least five teams. Six, max.

My crew and I played Double Dribble until the game’s legendary cinematic dunk sequences danced in our adolescent minds like a trippy ballet piece. You would think that at age fourteen the female gender would be the sole occupants of our nightly mindwalks, but let’s face it, until one of our cutie classmates started throwing down tomahawks from the foul line, Double Dribble was destined to get all of the love. Those dunk sequences (activated by pressing Down + B as you zipped your baller to the rim) still remains the best pre-T2 special effect, but that isn’t why Double Dribble makes the list.

That’s right, Double Dribble makes this list. Not a particular character, but the actual game itself. It has the uber-fantastical ability to transform your run of the mill player into an unmatched scoring machines. If you take any player – - ANY – - and position him in any corner behind the three-point arc, said player turns into a hybrid of Larry Bird, Reggie Miller, and Steve Kerr on a good day and Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and John Paxson on a bad one.

When I was about 14 or so, my downstairs neighbor, Al (who was three years older than me) would come by everyday after school so we could go at it on the digital hardwood. He’d always pick L.A. because the Lakers were his favorite NBA team, despite Double Dribble’s lack of a professional license. I’d always select my hometown team, New York, because, unlike him, I wasn’t a Johnny Turncoat.

Al had the uncanny ability to totally whip me good in Double Dribble. In retrospect, Al must’ve had a Matrix-like bond with Double Dribble because within moments of his first gaming session, he’d discovered the infamous hotspots and reigned threes upon me like an angry god. Me? I just couldn’t time a jumper to save my life, so I kept putting up clunker after clunker after that led to me losing by 20-30 points per game. I tried spamming dunks, but it didn’t help as Al was besting me by an extra point every time he sank a trey. So with him taking it from long range, and me taking it from short range, Double Dribble, essentially, became our personal 3-point and slam dunk orgy – - not too far removed from the current NBA, now that I think about it.

With my losses mounting, I’d inevitably get pissy and kick Al out. Think it’s unusual for a skinny 14 year old to push a 200+ pound high-schooler through the front door? Maybe. But I think it’s odder that a 17-year old wanted to hang with a 14-year old latchkeykid who still occasionally watched Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood on PBS. At least he wasn’t into gladiator movies.

In the grand scheme of things, Double Dribble’s rocket launchers are an impressive bunch, but the game’s lack of any real defense other than the extremely cheap steals (the plague of basketball games until the PlayStation 2 era) prevented them from placing higher in this contest. But as someone who in real life put up enough bricks to build mini-mansions throughout the most of the developing world, it made me feel like champ to arch ‘em in from deep.

Ah, digital retribution. The hope and dream of geeks worldwide.