PlayStation 1
Released in 1999 by Fox Sports Interactive
Grade: D+
This game is sluggish and missing too many pieces of basketball logic to be a serviceable game.
Where it falls in the series
It was one and done for Fox Sports Interactive.
Praises and gripes
It’s funny looking back on games like this. It tries so hard to blow you away with elaborate presentation gimmicks. You’ve got talkative announcers who digress into bits of side conversation (just like in real life!), but they’re usually a step behind and make lots of mistakes. After an emphatic slam, you might hear “Rejected!” There are frequent camera cuts and overly cinematic replays with the players in color and the background in black and white (remember that design trend from 1999?), but the normal gameplay camera sucks! Seriously, there are nine different cameras, but most are frustrating to use and none have the comfortable vertical viewpoint sports gamers are used to.
If you can deal with that, then the action itself will be sure to disappoint. It moves slow and it’s hard to make sense of what’s happening. Defense is a pain. There’s a useless “defensive stance” animation and basically no collision physics. You might think you’re in position to block a shot, and then you magically end up next to your man instead of in front of him. There’s no rebounding control or logic, leading to lots of offensive boards.
Other flaws include a weird free throw system and curiously dark skin tones. Chris Mullin looks like Jalen Rose, and Reggie Miller looks like Steven A. Smith.
At least you seem to have some control on offense. On the low difficulty levels, your best players can usually get to the hoop for satisfying dunks. The jumpshot animation is decent enough for you to learn the optimal release. And there are four offensive sets, but the default “motion” works best, so there’s no point in fiddling with it.
The 32-bit era was the dark ages for basketball video games. I still scratch my head that so many developers prematurely forced the genre into grainy 3D worlds and released shabby games like this one.
Published July 2, 2022