Regular readers of the Game Boy Player Land blog surely know that I'm an active member of the Together Retro game club at
http://www.racketboy.com. This month's game is the legendary
NBA Jam, a game that I loved in its SNES incarnation. However, something recently piqued my interest: the fact that Acclaim attempted to bring
NBA Jam to a Game Boy cartridge not once, but
five times since the birth of the classic franchise. That's a lot of ports, but are any of them any good? Well luckily for you, I played them so you don't have to. Let's take a look...
[img width=300 height=300]http://imgur.com/uQ3JDl.jpg[/img]
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The original
NBA Jam was ported to Game Boy in 1994, and it does a surprisingly decent job of bringing the original game's feel with it. Of course there are important omissions. There's obviously no "he's on fire!" commentary for instance. But the game does offer up an acceptable two-on-two arcade basketball experience. The biggest problem with the game (which we'll see across the board) is the logistics of the controls. The START button is the Turbo button on the Game Boy port, which was incredibly awkward on the original hardware. Luckily if you're playing this cart on the Game Boy Player then the Gamecube's proprietary controller actually makes this a more comfortable layout to utilize. In fact, this could be one of the only Game Boy games I can think of where I'll opt to use the Gamecube controller instead of the Hori pad.
[img width=300 height=300]http://imgur.com/Rbg31.jpg[/img]
[img width=200 height=200]http://imgur.com/Le2SI.jpg[/img] [img width=200 height=200]http://imgur.com/IwMkM.jpg[/img]
NBA Jam: Tournament Edition was released a year later. Unfortunately it wasn't the upgrade that SNES and Genesis received. Those games were flooded with new features and mountains of Easter Eggs. To be honest, I'm really not sure what the differences are in the Game Boy port of
T.E.. In fact, I've heard that the original
NBA Jam Game Boy game did in include some hidden characters (though I've never found them myself), while all sources I can find on the subject say that
T.E. (and all subsequent Game Boy series releases for that matter) removed hidden characters altogether.
[img width=300 height=300]http://imgur.com/AaTQ1.jpg[/img]
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NBA Jam 99 made the jump to the Game Boy Color and it was completely anticlimactic. Sure it's nice to see some colorized sprites, but somehow this game looked
less like an
NBA Jam title than the earlier Game Boy releases. Really, this game could be any old two-on-two basketball game. Though in fairness, it plays about the same as the Game Boy titles, so if you're really against black and white graphics then this could at least be an option to you.
[img width=300 height=300]http://imgur.com/7l0c4.jpg[/img]
[img width=200 height=200]http://imgur.com/dKn7u.jpg[/img] [img width=200 height=200]http://imgur.com/RJpVy.jpg[/img]
Much like the subtle (or pointless) upgrade from
NBA Jam to
Tournament Edition on the Game Boy, the release of
NBA Jam 2001 was really a bit of a head-scratcher. Other than the slight roster update that would come from two years of drafts, really there wasn't much to make this a noticeable upgrade. Same old non-impressive graphics. Same old gameplay from the 1994 Game Boy edition.
[img width=300 height=300]http://imgur.com/4XoKc.jpg[/img]
[img width=300 height=200]http://imgur.com/tR6ZM.jpg[/img] [img width=300 height=200]http://imgur.com/wz26O.jpg[/img]
If ever there was a system that
should have an
NBA Jam port it was the Game Boy Advance. Indeed, many of us GBA enthusiasts tend to lovingly think of our handhelds as a portable SNES. And why not? The GBA was technically capable of 32-bit games (or so Nintendo bragged), so handling an eight year old 16-bit title should have been no problem, right?
How sad it is then that
NBA Jam 2002 is actually the absolute
worst game that the franchise has ever released. Yes, that's right. I'm actually telling you that the original GB game with it's awkward control scheme is a far better game than this.
First of all
NBA Jam 2002 was able to utilize the GBA's hardware to at least alleviate the difficult control issues of earlier GB titles. But that might be its only strong point. You see it looks terrible considering the hardware it's running on. And though they were smart enough to bring an announcer back, he will annoy you within about 60 seconds with his limited array of voice clips (none of which include "he's on fire!" if you're wondering). The graphics are horrible. Indeed even when the ball goes through the hoop, it sure doesn't look like it. I really can't tell if I made a basket or not without keeping a close eye on the score. And the gameplay is just as terrible. Dunks are missed often, while three-pointers from the other end of the court are a breeze. And for some reason professional basketball players have a really hard time inbounding the ball without causing four or five turnovers in the process. I could go on, but I think you should just trust me when I say that this game is just really bad. No matter how good you know it
should be.
[img width=300 height=200]http://imgur.com/4zo8Tl.jpg[/img] [img width=300 height=200]http://imgur.com/EaEDfl.jpg[/img]
Apparently Acclaim also had plans to bring an updated
NBA Jam title to the Gamecube in 2004, but that never materialized. A part of me thinks this could have been amazing if it was going to be anything like the retro-fitted Wii game that's set to be released in October. But from the preview screens, it's hard to say how it would have actually panned out (see above).
At any rate, it's funny to think that there are five versions of this game available for the Game Boy line, and yet all I can do is wonder just how good SNES emulation is on GBA hardware. Yikes!
