Warning: This Game Is Canon

When I first stumbled across "Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden - Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa", I naturally assumed that it was not - could not, for that matter - be a real thing. How wrong I was. Tales of Games' freeware JRPG, done up in the style of classic SNES turn-based roleplaying games like Final Fantasy IV and Illusion of Gaia, is presented as an unofficial (yet, nevertheless, "canon") sequel to the Super Nintendo\Sega Genesis basketball throwdown game "Barkley Shut Up and Jam", despite the fact that there was an actual "Barkley Shut Up and Jam 2" released two years after the first. While I'm no videogame lawyer (actually I am,) I suspect that a major copyright litigation case is NOT in the works.

The plot of "Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden" is at least ten kinds of crazy. Here's a very brief snippet from the Wikipedia entry on the game:

Twelve years prior to the game, Charles Barkley, in an attempt to impress his son Hoopz Barkley, performs a Chaos Dunk—and inadvertently kills almost everyone present. As a result, basketball was made illegal and nearly all great players were killed in "The Great B-Ball Purge of 2041" (a.k.a "B-Ballnacht").

In 2053, another Chaos Dunk rocks Manhattan, killing fifteen million, and the blame falls on Charles, who is believed to be the only human capable of performing the Chaos Dunk. With the help of the Ultimate Hellbane, Charles escapes his pursuers: the B-Ball Removal Department, led by ex-NBA all-star Michael Jordan. Charles follows Ultimate Hellbane through the B-Ball Catacombs to the tomb of LeBron James, discovering that the Ultimate Hellbane is actually Balthios - the Octoroon great grandson of LeBron James. James contacts Charles from the B-ball dimension, offering him a warning which tells him to "seek the Cyberdwarf."

And that's just a SNIPPET. Click through for the full plot synopsis and then try to resist downloading this masterpiece right away. You can't, can you?

Here's Tales of Games' official trailer, if you're somehow not yet sold.

And Tales of Games doesn't stop there! Oh no.

"The Sewer Goblet: The Wu-Tang Clan and the Wu-Tang Baby" is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Replacing Charles Barkley with the Wu and swapping the SNES-era JRPG engine for an NES-era one, it follows the legendary rap enclave as they attempt to rescue a "majestic baby with a mysterious pendant" from an evil wizard and his henchman, Cheese Panda XD, both of whom live in the sewers (for some reason.)

You can grab "The Sewer Goblet" from Tales of Games' website.

[Tales of Games]