NBA Hangtime

"A 64-bit basketball game that plays like a 16-bit game!!!"

NBA Hangtime was one of the first few earliest basketball games for Nintendo 64 and was expected to demonstrate the power of the 64-bit hardware but surprisingly, NBA Hangtime has fallen beyond expectations.

Though NBA Hangtime was made by the original creators of NBA Jam, [One of the 16-bit Basketball games for Super Nintendo] due to some copyright problems, [or whatever it is, i am not pretty sure.] the team couldn't legally used the Jam name and the name was then changed to Hangtime. However, that doesn't mean that the developers cannot use the same exact engine and introduce idential gameplay to Hangtime.

If you have played NBA Jam before for the 16-bit Super Nintendo, then you probably have an idea of how NBA Hangtime played like.

NBA Hangtime features the NBA license and almost all the NBA teams and players are updated in relative to its development. Newly-added features include fade-aways, dribbling maneuvers, and create-a-player, thus giving the player more control than NBA Jam.

However, none of this really makes much difference since the usual dunk, shove, and snore-fest quickly returns. Gameplay is based on the two-on-two approach and up to a maximum of four players can jump in anytime.

Other than that, Midway's NBA Hangtime don't deserved to call Nintendo 64 home:the simple 2D character sprites and digitised heads indicate that half of the power of the Nintendo 64's actual processing power wasn't even reached yet and the low frame rate was simply unforgivable.

On the other hand, the far inferior Super Nes, NBA Jam houses a version that looks as good as and even plays much better than the Nintendo 64's because of a more user-friendly controller, let alone comparing it to the 32-bit Basketball games like Konami's In the Zone series.

The sound is reasonably quite decent, but nothing much difference to NBA Jam. Crowds do cheer and people do grunt. Announcer is pretty okay!

Technically, there is hardly any improvements in the gameplay, graphics, Al or sound; still this arcade port manages to deliver the solid gameplay that fans of the arcade and NBA Jam once knew. Other than that, there is nothing much new to offer, let alone showing it to your friends.

Graphics : 1.0/10.0
Concept : 2.0/10.0
Control : 1.5/10.0
Sound : 4.0/10.0
Gameplay : 3.5/10.0
Replay : 3.0/10.0
Challenge : 1.0/10.0
Overall : 2.0/10.0

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 02/01/00, Updated 12/16/02