#39: NBA Jam: Tournament Edition

Before the late 90's, realistic sports games weren't achievable.  It was impossible to create a realistic sports world with the limited computing power that the systems had available.  The answer to that?  Completely off the wall arcade-style sports games like NBA Jam T.E.

Everyone who's played a few games of NBA Jam knows what it's about.

The stories.

NBA Jam wants to make you have something to talk about later on - a reason to keep coming back.  It wants every game to be epic, competitive, off the wall, and fun.  It succeeded on every level.

Many hardcore sports gamers have complained about the rubber band system.  (Where the worse you're losing, the better stats your players get.)  I personally loved it.  I loved that matches rarely got so out of hand that it ended up being forgettable.  It was always close, there was always a chance.

Tournament Edition introduced a couple features to make gameplay even more insane. 

• Powerups - When collected, takes a single attribute (such as strength, dunking, 3 pointers, or speed) and makes it great.
• Hot Spots - A 3 foot circle randomly placed on each side of the court.  A basket made from a hot spot is worth 4-9 points instead of 2-3.

Originally, I thought that I would hate the new cartoony features.  One game changed all that.

I was down by 6 points and my opponent had the ball with 10 seconds left.  Then, something amazing happened.  I grabbed a strength powerup as my opponent went up for a dunk.  As he was coming down, I shoved him so hard that, while dropping the ball, he flew to the half-court line.  When I picked up the ball, a 7 point hot spot appeared.  I shot a 3-quarters of the 7-point buzzer beater to win the game.

After jumping up and down and cheering, I excitedly played around 5 more games straight.

I was hooked.  I still am.