Jammit (3DO)

Jammit is a one-on-one basketball game, played on half-courts with a basket at only one end. The back of the box calls this "streetball", but that sounds way too much like it was invented by a marketing executive to be real, in my opinion. That feel carries over to the whole game, as everything about it attempts to be gritty and edgy and street and all that stuff, albeit in an incredibly ineffectual, even quaint early 1990s way.

The back of the box says a lot of things, in fact. It tries to paint a picture of a merciless and violent world of street basketball, where players are "left gasping for air in intensive care", even though fouls are totally still in effect, and can be called for a bit of mildly aggressive shoving. It also says that there's "enough trash talk to dis the whole neighbourhood", when you mainly just hear the phrases "you be foulin'!" and "you're not so tough!" over and over, no matter which characters (of which there are only three) are in the game. Also there's meant to be five different courts, but in a couple of hours of play, I only saw two. But that's probably my fault for not being very good.

As I'm sure you've noticed from the screenshots, the character sprites in Jammit are digitised photos, ala Mortal Kombat, which is partially why I decided to play the 3DO version over the Mega Drive or SNES versions: I was going in blind, and had assumed that the sheer 90s power of the CD and a mighty 32-bit onsole would let this game look its best, maybe rivalling the arcade versions of the first few Mortal Kombat games. Unfortunately, as you can see, it's still got small, blurry sprites, and what you can't see is that the music is also a disappointment. Being on CD, I had my heart set on hearing some terrible, conspicuously clean-languaged original raps in this game, but the music just has that weird farty sound that so many America-developed Mega Drive games have.

I've been incredibly harsh on this game so far, but honestly, I had a lot of fun playing it, even though I'm terrible and won only about  two or three of the games I played. The games aren't all just the same, either: in single-player mode, each game you play has different rules: first to twenty-one points, points only count when you're shooting from an X that moves around the floor, points only count when you make the camera go into close-up mode, and so on. And the cheesiness of the game's aesthetic is incredibly charming and nostalgic, too. Jammit's far from a classic, and I wouldn't recommend going out of your way to play it, but if you ever stumble across the chance to do so, you'll probably have a pretty good time playing this pretty bad game.