Street Jam Basketball for Game Boy Adv Reviews by Gamers

When Midway popularized the arcade basketball series with the incredibly awesome NBA Jam, tons of game designers and publishers leapt onto that gravy train with their own take on that style of sports...and most failed miserably. Games like Charles Barkely: Shut up and Jam, Jammit, even White Men Can't Jump on the Jaguar attempted to reproduce the success Midway had with the genre, but never approached the same level of Midway's attention to gameplay detail. Acclaim, the holder of the NBA Jam franchise couldn't even offer up a decent version of the game on the Game Boy Advance when it launched that game a few years ago, creating what can easily be called one of the worst games on the handheld...ever. Street Jam Basketball isn't quite as bad as that, since it's obvious that the development team at least poured a bit more effort into this license-free three-on-three arcade baller. But there's no denying that Street Jam is a very bad game; the result here is a game that promises a lot but delivers very little. It's a barely-playable game that makes us, again, wish for the real deal Midway design on the handheld. Or, at least something that captures the charm of that design, because Street Jam Basketball misses it completely.

Features

• 45 different players
• Three gameplay modes
• Link cable support for two players
• Cartridge save (five slots)

It's a little odd to see a bling-bling street hoops basketball game come out of an Italian developer, but that's exactly what Street Jam is. Prograph Research is new to the GBA scene, and for the team's first game they've hit the inner cities with a three-on-three design that attempts to recreate the action of successful sports games like NBA Jam from Midway, and NBA Street from Electronic Arts. These mentioned games are obviously the inspiration for Street Jam, what with its no-rules, no-fouls, super dunk presentation. And though it may lift ideas from the successful games, it's ultimately an unbelievable failure because of incredibly stiff, hard-to-follow action.

It at least starts promising: the art direction for the character designs and backgrounds are perfectly kosher for a Game Boy Advance game, with bright colors for the graphics and a smoothly scrolling environment to keep up with the six-player action. There's five slots to save progress to cartridge, as well as several different gameplay options from Story Mode to Arcade to Exhibition...though these different modes don't really change all that much or offer anything different from each other. The game at least has a bit of presentation working for it.

But Street Jam immediately falls apart due to extremely stiff, choppy player animations. We're talking old-school 8-bit, worse than Double Dribble stiff, folks, with terrible animation emphasized by the game's inabilty to let players lean in or fade away with the ball. Players can only perform stiff jump shots in the exact spot their feet left the court. This strongly limits the gameplay, and many shots against the computer opponent get blocked simply because players can't adjust the style of shot to the basket. The terrible animation carries over to the horrible rim-bouncing physics, with the ball hitting the hoop in extremely canned animations that look completely unnatural. The game's full of animation short-cuts that add up to one incredibly rigid looking and clumsy playing sports game.

There's no player's license, so Street Jam has an entirely over-generic feeling throughout the experience. All of the players in the game have been designed with a stereotypical "street" look, and everyone has this bad-ass "brow furrow" appearance. The similar look to each player makes them blend together on the court, ultimately cluttering up the action and making it next to impossible to tell each other apart...aside from the different colored jerseys. So it's incredibly easy to get teammates lost in the shuffle.

It's a real shame how awful this game turned out. It's a lost opportunity because sports games aren't exactly flourishing on the Game Boy Advance, and with Acclaim dropping the ball with an absolutely abysmal NBA Jam game, DSI Games could have snuck in there with a game that capitalized on a somewhat vacant GBA genre...especially with the rising popularity of over-the-top street sports with games like NBA Ballers and NFL Street hitting console shelves around the same time.

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