NBA JAM Tournament Edition by High Voltage Software and Atari
Description:
Overview: When you fire up the game, you'll see a sweet NBA JAM logo on top of a static backdrop. The logo looks absolutely astounding. There are so many colors in it, you may drool. You'll be hearing some ultra bassy tunes at this time. The low bass flows from this tune, and it isn't a bad tune at all. You're shown an options menu from which you can select head-to-head, team game, practice and options. The options in this jam are great. You'll be able to configure your controller, set the drone difficulty, powerups, game type and more. You can choose to have cool little powerups pop up onto the court for super powers. Select a speed or turn on the hotspots. These hot spots are little areas that pop up with a number on 'em. Shoot from one of these spots and you'll be awarded the number of points that is shown on it. Great control over the options. The practice mode just lets you and a friend practice dunks, shooting, defense and passing. I use this mode just to pull off nifty dunks. Team game is for teaming up with a bud to try to defeat the computer. Head-to-head is for you vs. the computer. Play against a friend and each have drone partners. Hook up a Team Tap and have 2-on-1 or 2-on-2. Select a game and put in your initials for saving your stats. The select screen for the teams is much better than what you've been seeing on Genesis or SNES. The faces of the players are greatly enhanced. No longer do you only have 2 dudes to play with. You'll be able to select from 3. When you finish all the teams, you'll be awarded some nifty little stuff like more characters to choose from on each team. In the graphics dept. of this cart, you'll notice lots of little subtleties that really make a difference. The characters are slightly enlarged from the arcade version. The players scale in and out in a 3D aspect unlike the SNES and Genesis versions. There are about 3-4 layers of parallax scrolling. The court tilts up and down as your characters go the width of the court. This is kind of a vertical parallax I guess. Also, the hoop tilts, which is also a minor improvement, but hey....it definitely adds to the realism. Nice animation has gone in. Cheerleaders and people in the crowd have quite a few frames of animation. When your character scores the baskets in a row to be "on fire", you'll notice that the fire coming off of the ball is transparent! I really liked that. Another cool part are the transparent shadows. As you bounce the ball, the shadow will change in size accordingly. And the same thing goes with the players' shadows. Player animation is also extremely excellent. Soundwise, people have said that NBA JAM has the cheesiest music on the Jag...hmmmm...I think I'll save that one for Trevor McFur. The music is definitely no T2K or D2K. I'd say it's around the quality of FFL's but only longer. There's no doubt about it though, the bass is great. Some of the tunes are corny, but others will make you feel as if you were watching a late-night highlights reel. Some of them contain some cool techno aspects, and overall, I don't think you'll be too disappointed in the tunes. Voicing is crystal clear. Another thing NBA JAM is known for is it's excellent play-by-play commentary. The Jag version pulls out all the stops. The announcer call out the players names as they shoot which isn't found in a lot of other versions. After I played the game a lot in 3 days, I was still hearing stuff that I hadn't heard before. Even the names of the new secret characters are called, although you can tell it's another voice actor doing them. You will notice a few missing samples it you've played JAM in the past. Like the Tarzan yell, or "can't buy a bucket", and "the nail in the coffin". No biggie though => Control is dead on. You can hand the controller to a little kid and let him know what the buttons do, and he'll be in close competition with ya in no time. You can configure the buttons to your liking, and also the ProController allows you to use the index buttons for your turbo boost. Nothin' to complain about here. Overall, this game kicks butt. It shines through as one of the top Jaguar games. It is polished and it shows by the overall feeling that you get when you play it. You won't feel as if they've cut a corner on you in the design. The new codes and everything just add more to the already addicting gameplay. Some of these cades are great...like the 32X Doom code where your characters move around constantly facing the screen without any animation. Or the CD emulation code where the game loads between quarters for about 20-30 seconds posing to be the Saturn and Playstation versions. NBA JAM on the Jaguar rocks!
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