There are probably a few people out there who haven't experienced the phenomenon that is NBA Jam. It started as an arcade game and migrated its way to the Sega Genesis, eventually slumming on the PC. It featured weird looking NBA players, two per team, in a ridiculous basketball game. Only it's not the sort of basketball you see on NBC on Sundays. No, it's a surreal version of the game that stretches all of the players' physical gifts to the extreme. Players jump 30 feet in the air, dunk from the half-court line, make incredible passes, make three-pointers like they were lay-ups and perhaps most surreal of all, feature enormous heads (it's hard to say what physical gift this exaggeration is supposed to represent. . . Freud would probably say it was. . . oh, never mind).
Anyway, NBA Jam came out awhile ago for the PC (finally) and created nary a ripple. Now, like many of the console companies, Acclaim is trying the simultaneous release approach with College Slam, releasing it on the same day on all platforms: PC, PlayStation, Saturn, Genesis and SNES. College Slam is NBA Jam without the NBA license - instead, you have a bunch of NCAA teams, minus any recognizable players (college players are amateurs, and thus cannot appear in any commercial products).
The main differences, aside from the anonymous players, between this game and NBA Jam are added features like power-ups and hot-spots for shots. Both of these are optional, but add an even more surreal edge to the product when enabled. Hot-spots give you extra points when you make a shot while standing on one of them. The power-ups are just plain weird. Guys turn into tornadoes. Baskets disappear. Players turn invisible.
It may not cure cancer, improve your sex life or grow hair on balding men, but College Slam, like NBA Jam, is still an immensely entertaining pseudo-sports game. It's to real basketball as Doom is to reality (know any Marines who can take hundreds of bullets while touring hell? OK, so that guy down the street can do it. Name two...). Jump higher then Jordan, pass better then Magic and dunk harder then Shaq in this trash-talking, high-flying, slam-dunking and power-up grabbing misrepresentation of the most popular sport on the globe.
Since the game is pretty much NBA Jam minus the celebrities (and therefore much of that title's charm), is College Slam a worthy stand-alone game or a cynical marketing ploy designed to steal the money of 12 year old NBA Jam fans? Who cares? They probably stole the cash from their parents anyways. The game's fun, in a slight sort of way. Check your brain at the door.
