Free Throw

Free Throw is exactly what the title promises: grab a basketball, drag it back like a slingshot, let go, and see if it drops through a moving hoop before your sixty seconds run out. It's one of Frank Force's small LittleJS arcade prototypes, and it plays like one -- a single mechanic, polished, and over almost as soon as it starts.

We tested this by directly manipulating the drag gesture at the engine level rather than guessing at screen coordinates, since the ball's grab radius is small enough that an imprecise tap or click simply misses it. Once we found the exact spot, the throw mechanic held up well: press down within a tight radius of the ball, drag away, and release. The velocity of the throw scales with how far you pulled, exactly as the on-screen hint promises ("Farther drags throw harder"), and the ball follows a real arc with gravity and a bounce off the floor and backboard, not a canned animation. We confirmed this working identically with raw touch events on a simulated phone and with a real mouse drag on desktop -- the same code path handles both, and neither control scheme feels like an afterthought.

What doesn't hold up as well is the pacing of the actual challenge. The hoop drifts back and forth across the top of the screen, and over five consecutive throws in one session we didn't sink a single one -- the combination of a fast-moving target, a short flight time, and no aiming reticle beyond the drag line itself means early attempts are mostly about calibrating your own sense of the arc rather than reacting to the hoop's position. That's a fair ask for a toy this small, but it does mean the first minute or two can feel like flailing rather than playing, and there's nothing else to fall back on while you calibrate -- no practice mode, no slower difficulty, just the same 60-second clock every time.

There's also just not much game here beyond the one interaction. A single hoop, a single ball, a single timer, and a best-score line in the corner. That's fine for what it is -- a free, open-source arcade sketch, not a shipped product -- but it means the ceiling on how long this holds your attention is low even if you do get good at it.

Verdict: Free Throw's core feel is genuinely well-made -- the drag-throw physics are satisfying and identical across touch and mouse -- but the moving hoop makes early scoring feel more like luck than skill, and there's no second mechanic or mode to grow into once you've got the timing down. Worth a minute of your time; not much more than that.