GAME PLAY
GETTING STARTED
GRAPHICS
SOUND CHECK
VALUE

NBA Jam Tournament Edition

By Fredric Paul

Summary: NBA Jam is far from perfect, but it's clearly the most entertaining computer-basketball game around.

NBA Jam may be old news for arcade and cartridge hoopsters, but Acclaim's new Tournament Edition CD-ROMs for DOS and Windows 95 look plenty fresh on the PC screen.

More than a year late to the personal computer, the 2-on-2 basketball game still isn't fully up to date, lacking the current season's trades, rookies, and expansion teams. And there are no plans to move Mourning to Miami, Rodman to Chi-town, or Coleman to Philly, much less add the Raptors and Grizzlies, who might have made good practice fodder for rookie gamers. Regardless, NBA Jam T.E. delivers the essence of the over-the-top roundball game on your computer, with no sense of lost speed or excitement.

You start by picking your two-man team, and then have to work your way up through the league's 27 teams. Beat the lowly Mavericks, and you get to challenge the mighty Timberwolves, and so on. When you finally conquer the world-champion Rockets, you get the chance to match up against superstar and other special teams.

The game's 120-plus NBA players all look great, actually resembling the real players. Many of the stars are avail- able, but some of the biggest names--Michael Jordan and Shaquille O'Neal, for example--are missing.

An options menu lets you play straight up (with your choice of speed and difficulty), or you can choose to play with all kinds of powerups, hot spots, and juice modes--not to mention the computer assist feature, which cools off the team that's in the lead to keep the game close. Of course, the players perform those trademark sky-high 360-degree monster dunks that make Air Jordan look grounded.

As long as you have a game pad and a fairly speedy computer, you get the full arcade experience, which has good points and bad points. The 2-on-2 action is fast and furious, the controls simple and sure, the animation smooth and seamless, the sound effects and voice-overs superb--although somewhat limited compared to the arcade version.

But it's still NBA Jam: You can't call plays, you can't go out of bounds, there are no fouls, brutality is rewarded more than finesse, and defense consists entirely of blocks and steals. Of course, what with all the fights and trash-talking and music blaring and so on, the NBA itself seems to be trying to become more and more like NBA Jam every day.

A bigger problem for serious hoopsters, and one that carries over from the arcade and cartridge versions, is that you can see only about a third of the court at a time. If the player you're controlling isn't near the ball, you may have a hard time figuring out exactly where he is. That can cause a real problem on transition defense.

NBA Jam may not be a realistic basketball simulation, but it's sure a lot of fun. 

 

Review by PC Games