Arcades have had their share of successful sports games, but before the heyday of Golden Tee or Big Buck Hunter, there was NBA Jam, the ultimate in simplified, friendship-jeopardizing gameplay. EA’s new NBA Jam wrests itself from the hands of developers who tried too hard to make the franchise “modern,” when that’s the least that needed to happen. What we get now is a nearly pitch-perfect refresh of Jam that connects with how a generation remembered it: a two-on-two basketball game that barely played by league rules.
The centerpiece of this NBA Jam is the Classic Campaign mode, the traditional gauntlet of all of the NBA’s teams — beat one, and it’s right on to the next. There’s little else to it, but it’s there where you’ll get the best of what the game has to offer: violent shoves and steals, the bombastic (and repetitive) announcer, the showboating slam dunks, and of course, the players’ cut-out-style heads that never stop looking goofy on their polygonal (and well-animated) bodies. But that more than works, and it’s a genuine wonder why no previous Jam developers tried such a head-slappingly obvious approach after the original arcade game.
