Sega Genesis
Released in 1996 by Acclaim
Grade: B+
College Slam is near the top of the list of games that really shouldn’t exist. It’s basically NBA Jam: Tournament Edition (released two years earlier) with college teams, nameless players, and slightly weaker presentation.
Where it falls in the series
It’s the one and only, released on Genesis, SNES, Game Boy, MS-DOS, PS1, and Saturn.
Praises and gripes
As usual, the gameplay is fantastic, with two players per team zipping around and leaping high for big slam dunks. The control is responsive and intuitive. The graphics are clear and charming.
I like to grade games based on their substance (gameplay), but I’m going B+ instead of the solid A that the previous NBA Jam games got here. The one significant gameplay change is that players can burst forward for a short moment, some kind of “extra turbo” feature, and it’s not a good change. It’s annoying, frankly. Besides that, the sounds are lower quality, the music is much worse, and the crowd doesn’t look as full or defined.
You’ve got 44 college teams, but no real players. You choose two players out of five, each corresponding to a position with his own combo of attributes. If you want, you can edit the names of players. I can’t imagine anyone is crazy enough to recreate college teams from 1996, but you could give your players silly college-themed names like “Kegstand Monster” and “Addicted to Percoset.”
You can call a timeout to make a substitution. You can set up a 32-team tournament (which, oddly, you couldn’t do in NBA Jam: Tournament Edition). That’s really it. You’d have to really hate NBA basketball to want to get this version instead.