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Before NBA Jam, Midway tested the waters with another two-on-two basketbrawl game called Arch Rivals. Regardless of arcade success, the formula didn’t translate well at all on the Genesis, and what we got was basically a shell of the coin-op. Even so, we’ve bravely set out onto the court for a hands-on, and we’ve come back with a full review, so read it before someone pulls our pants down!
The early days of the Genesis were marked by big name licenses attached to… not so big games. Buster Douglas Knockout Boxing, Tommy Lasorda Baseball, and Pat Riley Basketball were just a few of the titles that were pushed based on their endorsements, rather than their features and gameplay. Pat Riley was particularly offensive in this regard, sporting – no pun intended – dull gameplay and some wacky physics.
When you think “racing game,” you tend to think of blinding speed and screeching tires. Few people, if any, would think of loop-de-loops and… cows? Yes, the latter can only bring one racer to mind – that of Atari’s Hard Drivin’, which received a Genesis port by Tengen. Was the game too much for the stock console to handle, or was the old black box capable of reproducing a true driving simulator?
Street basketball is well-represented in video games. From early classics like Jordan vs. Bird to the immensely popular NBA Jam series, there are quite a few games from which to choose (so long as you ignore White Men Can’t Jump on the Jaguar!). Jammit, Virgin Games’ entry on the court, may lack the real players of NBA Jam, but it sure does make up for it in attitude!
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and by that logic Capcom’s Street Fighter II must be blushing like a virgin bride on her wedding day. The amount of clones out there that shamelessly rip off the arcade classic is staggering, and it seemed that everyone tried to cash in on the craze at one time or another. Kaneko’s Deadly Moves, also released on the SNES as Power Moves, was one such cash run. To say it compares poorly to its source material would be a major understatement, and one wonders just how inspired (or drunk) its developers really were when they set out to create it.