NBA Jam Extreme

Review by: Greg Leedberg

NBA Jam has always been the basketball game that even non sports fans could enjoy. It had an emphasis more on speed and fancy dunks than accuracy, and was always fun to play with 3 of your friends. However, the first 2 Jams were developed by Midway, and Extreme was developed by Acclaim. The big question is, how did Acclaim do without Midway? Well...

Graphics: 7/10
NBA Jam Extreme, unlike the first Jam and T.E., is 3-D, with the players made out of texture-mapped polygons. They seem slighty blurry (but not too much), so at times it seems to be harder on this game to distinguish between the player's faces, but if you turn on big-head mode, it makes it much easier (but it looks less realistic). Also, the moving camera is really nice, and never gets in your way. The players are motion-captured (what else would Acclaim do?), which looks really good during the game, but when the players do their victory dances after a dunk, they hardly look motion-captured at all.

Sound: 9/10
There's no continous music like in the older Jam games, but every now and then, a short cheer song will play, or the crowd will start pounding out "We Will Rock You." The crowd also cheers quite a lot, to make up for the loss of music. The announcer still makes commentary on the game, but starts to get repititous kind of fast, but it's not too bad. His voice is crystal clear, though.

Gameplay: 8/10
This game adds a new Extreme button in addition to the old Turbo button. Basically, Extreme is a better Turbo (you'll run faster, pull off more accurate dunks), but it drains your Turbo bar extremely fast (maybe that's where they got the name). The control of the players seems to be a little looser, but that's okay. Also, it's sometimes hard to tell who has the ball, but big-head mode fixes that.

Replay Value: 7/10
You have 28 teams to beat, so that should keep you for a while. However, once those are all beaten, there's really not much to come back for other than playing with (or even better, against) your friends, unless you want to replay all those teams with different players. There's probably a lot of hidden players, too, though, like in the old Jams. If you can find those, you'll probably play this even longer.

Overall: 8.5/10
This is a very good game. It has a different "feel" than the older Jams, so some NBA Jam fans may not like this, but I know that I do. This may be one of Acclaim's best games (Not including their ports of Midway titles).