Wayback Wednesday: NBA Jam 99 Retrospective
This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at NBA Jam 99.
After Acclaim snatched the NBA Jam moniker away from Midway, they attempted to continue the series with NBA Jam Extreme. Although losing the iconic brand was naturally a blow, Midway nevertheless released their own superb follow-up to NBA Jam Tournament Edition in NBA Hangtime. To that point, while Acclaim had the name, Midway boasted the superior game. With that in mind, it’s perhaps no surprise that Acclaim sought to change up the formula with NBA Jam 99, moving away from an arcade style and adopting more of a sim or sim-arcade hybrid approach.
Of course, while that differentiated it from previous NBA Jam titles and Midway’s new arcade hoops games, it also placed NBA Jam 99 in direct competition with the NBA Live series. However, Acclaim didn’t completely abandon the series’ roots with NBA Jam 99, as it included an arcade mode. While true sim-arcade hybrid basketball games have their place and I’ve come to appreciate them, NBA Jam 99 wasn’t a good take on the concept. Indeed, it was proof that Midway deserved the name that they coined far more than Acclaim did. Let’s take a look back…way back…
If not for the name, you wouldn’t recognise NBA Jam 99 as an NBA Jam title. In contrast to all of the previous NBA Jam games from both Acclaim and Midway, the Nintendo 64 version of NBA Jam 99 features 5-on-5 gameplay. It was originally meant to include both 5-on-5 and 2-on-2 gameplay, but only the Game Bay Color version retained the traditional NBA Jam style. The N64 version clearly embraces the new sim direction, with NBA Play being the first mode listed in the main menu. It’s comprised of Exhibition games, Season mode, and a standalone Playoffs mode. You can also view all of the teams’ rosters, though you aren’t able to customise them at all.
NBA Play is undoubtedly intended to be sim-oriented. By default, all the rules apart from Illegal Defense are in effect, and injuries and fatigue are also enabled. You can quickly toggle between simulation and arcade settings though, or customise the rules and gameplay options individually. Quarter length can be set to 1-12 minutes, with five being the default setting. There are three difficulty levels: Rookie, Veteran, and All-Star. Each team has seven timeouts, and you can make substitutions in any dead ball situations. In short, several authentic details and staple settings that you’d expect to see in a 5-on-5 sim game of the era are present and accounted for in NBA Jam 99.
The controls are also familiar. On offense, B passes the ball, while A shoots (tap to fake a shot). R is icon passing, and L and Z are turbo. You can call for a pick with C-Left or tap it to perform an alley-oop, call a play with C-Right (followed by pressing the corresponding play button), back down in the post with C-Down, and perform dribble moves with C-Up. On defense, A jumps to block and rebound. B attempts a steal instead of switching; a design choice with the pass button that I’ve never liked, but it’s functional. C-Left and R are used to switch control to another player. C-Down gets your player down into a defensive stance, and finally, C-Up performs a shove.
On paper, this is all fine. In execution…well, to put it bluntly, the game falls well short of the manual’s claim of being “the 5-on-5 phenomenon you’ve dreamed of”! While the playbooks do indeed include 80+ plays, the CPU doesn’t play strategically or very realistically. The wrong players are frequently taking (and making) the most shots. That isn’t entirely unusual in sim games of this vintage, but NBA Jam 99 is far behind NBA Live 99 on the court, and nowhere near as authentic as it proclaims itself to be. Mind you, back then, even hardcore sim heads who were demanding games strive for more and more realism could usually still have fun if the gameplay was fairly solid.
Unfortunately, that isn’t the case with NBA Jam 99. While the controls aren’t too bad considering the N64 controller wasn’t made for sim basketball games, it does feel like Shoot and Pass are backwards, and again, I prefer Pass to become Switch on defense. Even if you get used to that though, the game speed is far too fast for a sim, or even a sim-arcade hybrid. It’s poorly-balanced on every difficulty level, with the CPU being close to impossible to guard or elude. Dribble moves are ineffective, mostly resulting in turnovers as you try to get past a defender. The AI is far too adept at drawing fouls – especially incredibly cheap charges – and hits contested jumpshots that you can’t.
Mechanically, NBA Jam 99 doesn’t measure up to its peers such as NBA Live 99. Animations for dunks and layups are poor, even for the time. Occasionally you’ll make a driving dunk that feels somewhat satisfying, but most possessions will be an exercise in frustration. Player movement and control is responsive enough, but the turbo control doesn’t allow enough explosiveness and players get stuck to each other very easily, leading to many of the aforementioned charging fouls. Teammates don’t display much intelligence or offer adequate help even when you call plays. Likewise, the CPU is only challenging due to a lack of balance, not because of clever strategy.
Directional passing is a nightmare, particularly when inbounding after a basket. A target will appear under your teammates’ feet, indicating when they’re the intended recipient based on the direction your player is currently facing. It’s a nice idea, but there’s a tendency for the recipient to suddenly switch from the player closest to you in the backcourt to a heavily guarded player in the frontcourt. This makes it way too easy to turn the ball over on an unintended full court inbounds pass. Icon passing can obviously alleviate this issue, but that shouldn’t be necessary in order to make a quick inbounds pass to your closest teammate, i.e. the most frequent and logical choice.
Like far too many other games in the late 90s, NBA Jam 99 tried to reinvent the wheel with free throw shooting instead of imitating NBA Live’s reliable T-Meter. When a player is at the line in NBA Jam 99, an aerial view of the rim appears at the top of the screen along with a basketball. The goal is to move the basketball with the left stick so that it’s properly aimed at the hoop before hitting Shoot. It’s not the worst approach I’ve seen, but trying to achieve a perfect or even just a decent aim is extraordinarily difficult. More often than not, you’ll be whistled for a ten-second free throw violation before you can line up a shot. This definitely wasn’t the game to incorporate that rule!
NBA Jam Extreme had been a mediocre take on the arcade style, but NBA Jam 99 is a truly awful attempt at sim gameplay. Even if you want to argue that it’s more of a sim-arcade hybrid, it’s nowhere near as polished as Konami’s In the Zone games. One of the keys to having good sim-arcade hybrid gameplay is to balance well-designed sim elements that reward some degree of realistic and strategic play, with loose, arcade-like moments to facilitate a more frenetic, action-packed style of virtual basketball. NBA Jam 99 utterly fails to do that, with the sim and arcade aspects impeding and overpowering rather than complementing each other. As a sim title, it’s painfully bad.
However, in addition to the ability to customise the rules and other gameplay options in NBA Play, there’s also Jam Mode. It’s an attempt to bridge the gap between the original arcade style and the new approach of being a sim or sim-arcade hybrid. To that end, it doesn’t offer any gameplay options apart from difficulty level and quarter length. Fouls, fatigue, and injuries aren’t a factor here, but there are some differences to simply toggling them off in NBA Play. The standard slams are joined by wacky, over-the-top jams, including somersault dunks, 720 degree spins, and higher than normal leaps. Three unanswered shots will also allow your player to get On Fire.
You might think that eliminating the rules and other sim elements would address some of the shortcomings of the attempt at simulation-oriented gameplay. Sadly, Jam Mode is arguably even worse! For a start, it doesn’t feel remarkably different, because NBA Play features the same super speed. The lack of rules makes the imbalance even more frustrating, as not only will the CPU easily strip the ball and intercept passes, it can also constantly knock you down for steals. It’s tough to reliably return the favour, or match the CPU’s shot-blocking acumen. Jumpshot timing isn’t any more forgiving than it is in NBA Play; for the user, anyway. The CPU will effortlessly make its shots.
5-on-5 gameplay generally doesn’t suit the arcade style – NBA Live’s short-lived arcade mode was OK, albeit more of a novelty at best – but the lack of polish in NBA Jam 99 makes it a disaster. Five players is too many to effectively switch between on defense when there’s such a fast pace, and it clogs up the floor, stifling up-and-down action. Between players being stripped and knocked down, psychic interceptions, and completely broken directional pass aiming, Jam Mode is a turnover fest with very few enjoyable possessions or exciting highlights. Perhaps worst of all, the small handful of legacy staples of NBA Jam are implemented so terribly that it’s an insult to the name.
The over-the-top dunk animations are ugly. Granted, the regular dunks and other animations are embarrassingly subpar even for the era, but there’s no thrill or joy to seeing players awkwardly and stiffly somersault, spin 720 degrees, or imitate Karl Malone’s special delivery dunk at supersonic speed. Also, if you can get On Fire – it’s not easy with the lack of balance – it’s a shadow of the iconic power-up. The flame effects on the players are pathetically underwhelming, and you don’t even burn the nets with your buckets. Worse yet, instead of your Fire being doused by a basket, it can be lost with a turnover. Even NBA Jam Extreme was able to get that part right!
Using the NBA Jam brand to sell this new attempt at a 5-on-5 sim/sim-arcade hybrid title was certainly misleading. At least NBA Jam Extreme was a mediocre attempt to replicate the formula that Midway had established. NBA Jam 99 is NBA Jam in name only. That mightn’t be so bad if they’d at least done a respectable job with the new sim-oriented direction, or even just managed to provide a decent traditional arcade mode. It’s a shame that the NBA licensing department couldn’t somehow step in and give the name back to Midway. I’m not the biggest fan of Midway’s arcade basketball games that follow NBA Hangtime, but they were way better than Acclaim’s efforts!
Also, the attempt to change up the formula while still maintaining some traditional NBA Jam elements resulted in some really baffling design choices. One that springs immediately to mind is the inclusion of Tag Mode. That was a great addition in NBA Jam Tournament Edition, allowing us to switch control on passes. Of course, that’s the usual approach to passing in sim games, and Tag Mode is on by default in NBA Jam 99, but I don’t see the point of it. I suppose it’s a rudimentary form of Player Lock, but it feels really awkward to pass to a teammate and then have to switch to them. Again, it’s an option and not the default setting anyway, but it’s a highly unnecessary vestige.
I’d also suggest that the AI suffered from the attempt at being a sim-arcade hybrid. Not only is there a general lack of intelligence and players moving with purpose, but disabling the rules – either by customising NBA Play or playing in Jam Mode – can break the game. When ten-seconds-in-the-half isn’t in effect, CPU opponents will sometimes forget about bringing the ball up the floor, instead dribbling out the shot clock before heaving up a Hail Mary from the backcourt. Once again, there’s barely any difference between the difficulty levels as far as the ease of making plays or the aggressiveness of your opponents. It’s a truly miserable virtual hoops experience.
For as much as it matters, the presentation in NBA Jam 99 is trying to replicate an NBA broadcast. Kevin Harlan and Bill Walton are on the call, and they deliver their lines – even the snarky ones when you mess up – with sincere passion. Unfortunately, the gameplay doesn’t do their performance justice. Those snarky quips also become grating because so many mistakes are the result of the gameplay being a frustrating mess. There are automatic replays and a manual instant replay mode, though the former lacks slow motion, and the latter has terrible camera controls. The overlays, arena ditties, and other atmospheric elements are fine, but they can’t salvage the game.
A majority of games from the early 3D era have aged poorly, especially sports titles that were trying to look realistic. As such, when we look back at those games decades later, it’s important that we compare them to their peers, not their far more advanced successors. With that being said, the player models and face textures in NBA Jam 99 are unimpressive and unappealing for their time. It feels like Acclaim were aiming for a mix of realism and cartoony action figures in the aesthetic, leading to square, stocky models that are vastly inferior to contemporary sim titles. Even if we just compare it to other Nintendo 64 releases, it doesn’t look anywhere near as good as NBA Live 99.
As far as menu functionality and design, there aren’t too many issues. The frontend is fairly aesthetically pleasing, and there’s no egregious back-and-forth with options and settings unnecessarily buried deep in the menus. The inability to move players in the active lineup to a different position without swapping them for a bench player first is annoying, though it wasn’t uncommon then. In fact, all versions of NBA Live 99 have that same shortcoming. Amusingly though, the PA Announcer in NBA Jam 99 will acknowledge these phantom substitutions to shuffle the lineups, announcing that a player has been subbed out and then immediately announcing their return to the game.
There are some other nitpicks I could make here, such as the player stats screens only displaying two columns at once, making inefficient use of the available space. The columns also don’t seem to scroll back and forth with any consistency, so viewing the entire box score is a more cumbersome process than it should be. Using 0-99 ratings for the team abilities rather than rankings doesn’t look quite right either, especially as it doesn’t seem to marry up to the listed Overall Rating. As I said, these are nitpicks, but they underscore the issues with the overall vision for the game, and inexperience with developing sim hoops titles. The art direction for the frontend is nice, though.
Let’s talk about the modes in NBA Jam 99. As noted, NBA Play includes both Season and Playoffs. The latter is your basic standalone Playoffs mode. As in NBA Live and other titles, you can select a 1-1-1-1, 1-3-3-3, 3-5-5-5, or 5-7-7-7 series format. You can also choose to have brackets of two, four, eight or 16 teams, which allows you to skip rounds all the way up to the NBA Finals. If you select one of the 16 teams from the 1998 Playoffs, that will be the default bracket. Otherwise, custom brackets will be generated, or you can manually customise them as desired. The quarter length and difficulty settings can also be changed. All in all, it’s a standard and serviceable mode.
Season mode on the other hand is quite interesting. There are the usual options: a season length of 28, 56, or 82 games, Playoff format, number of postseason teams, quarter length, difficulty, and whether or not the trade deadline is in effect. We can also choose between Traditional and Franchise Season play. The Traditional setting is, as the name would imply, the standard type of Season mode you’ll find in many old school sim and sim-arcade hybrid titles. There are no restrictions on trades, free agent signings, or creating players. The Bonus Points – the in-game currency that allows you to perform various roster management tasks – aren’t in effect in a Traditional Season.
Conversely, a Franchise Season is a primitive take on a Franchise mode. There are no salaries, so there’s no financial component to trades, and players can be signed and released freely during the season. The CPU can accept or reject trade offers though, and will also make moves of its own. You can also choose to swap Bonus Points if you’d like to stock up on them, or even trade Draft Picks to use on generated rookies with randomised names because yes, there’s multi-season play! In fact, there’s no limit to the number of Franchise seasons you can play, as it’ll just keep looping. The years will roll over, and you can even select new Season settings upon starting a new one.
Free agency in the offseason is where you’ll end up spending points on players. As in NBA Live, you’ll have a chance to re-sign your players, though here you bid on them with Bonus Points. You can obviously choose to let players go, too. Next, you’ll bid on free agents on the open market. You’ll be informed of what other teams have bid for their services, and if you have the Points, you can make a higher bid. You can only make a limited number of free agent signings during the offseason, though. Players also develop in training camp, which is an automated step. On the whole, it’s a fairly simplified Franchise experience, but still respectable as one of the earliest attempts.
Create-a-Player isn’t as useful as in other games. You can only create players to add to teams that you control, and there must be fewer than 12 players on the roster to do so. In fact, while you can have up to 13 players while trading or signing free agents, you must trim that to 12 to have a valid lineup. Due to the fact you can only add players to your teams, and their ratings are limited by the Bonus Points at your disposal, it isn’t a good way of adding missing players in a Franchise Season. Ratings aren’t limited in a Traditional Season since Bonus Points don’t come into play, but it’s still not good for roster customisation. Additionally, players can’t be edited further once they’re created.
Still, it’s better than having no Create-a-Player at all. Also, you can actually enter a nickname, hometown, and custom college name for your created players. There’s no face sculpting, but there are ample custom face options. On the whole, I think that Season play in NBA Jam 99 – at least the Franchise version – works better with the original players and generated rookies. Both Season modes have some nice extras though, including news reports and box scores for both played and simulated games. Considering that NBA Live’s franchise modes didn’t add viewable box scores until the mid 2000s, NBA Jam 99 was undoubtedly ahead of its time in offering that feature.
Simulated stats do leave something to be desired, though. Much as the wrong players will take the most shots during gameplay, there are wild inaccuracies such as Tim Hardaway leading the league in scoring. Since there isn’t a separate quarter length setting for simulation and gameplay, choosing shorter quarters will also result in much lower stats. The standings aren’t too unrealistic, but most Playoff simulations see the New Jersey Nets topple the San Antonio Spurs in the first NBA Finals. The Spurs did of course win the title in 1999 so that’s a fun prediction by the sim engine, but the Nets being champs feels like some bias towards cover player Keith Van Horn!
There are also the annual award winners, though since there are no rookies in the game unless you create a player, no 1999 Rookie of the Year will be awarded. The lineups for the All-Star Game are selected based on season performance, which does result in some unorthodox picks due to sim engine inaccuracies. However, you can actually override those selections with your own custom All-Star teams, which is a really cool yet uncommon option. Despite some of the quirks, liberties with accuracy, and a bit of roughness, those little touches and respectable depth in general make both Season modes in NBA Jam 99 quite impressive for a game that came out in 1998.
Here’s the catch, though: gameplay is paramount, and NBA Jam 99 simply isn’t good enough on the sticks to encourage you to play through a Season. It’s a classic staple of bad basketball video games: cool ideas that you wish were in a game that’s actually enjoyable! NBA Jam 99 had good intentions, and Iguana West – the subsidiary studio that developed it and NBA Jam Extreme for Acclaim – did have history on the virtual hardwood. Indeed, going back to their roots as Sculptured Software, they made some standout hoops titles, including Tecmo Super NBA Basketball and NCAA Basketball, aka World League Basketball, aka Super Dunk Shot. Sadly, this one was a total bust.
Finally, there’s also a Skills Mode, which is comprised of a Three-Point Shootout, and the ability to practice free throws. A Three-Point Shootout is always a welcome extra mode in my book, though this particular one suffers from the game speed and clunky mechanics that afflict regular gameplay. The free throw practice was an excellent idea as well, though I can’t say that it helped me master what I find to be a frustrating foul shooting mechanic. Nevertheless, it’s another sign that the developers were trying to make a great sim or sim-arcade hybrid basketball game with depth and authenticity. Again, there are good ideas here, but the on-court experience is absolutely pitiful.
It’s why I was baffled when I looked back at some contemporary reviews and saw that they were generally positive! It certainly makes me question the credentials of those reviewers, because even a casual basketball gamer would recognise the stiff, awkward animations, lack of balance, and general absence of fun and excitement. A passionate and knowledgeable sim basketball gamer can point out even more issues! There were some negative reviews and publications that scored it as fairly mediocre, but too many of the big magazines and sites awarded it a score of 8/10 or a percentage in the 80s. GamePro called out many of the issues, but still gave it a generous 3.5 stars out of 5.
Like NBA Live 99, NBA Jam 99 was released during the 1998 lockout, and thus also captures a snapshot of the league in limbo. The defending champion Chicago Bulls remain intact, with Roster Guard in place of Michael Jordan. Clyde Drexler is absent, having announced his retirement after the Houston Rockets’ first round elimination. Postseason and Draft Day trades are accounted for, though Nick Van Exel still has #9 in Denver instead of the #31 he switched to, and Chris Webber wears #2 for the Kings since Corliss Williamson’s change to #34 hadn’t happened yet. Notably, Sacramento’s signing of Peja Stojakovic isn’t reflected, again leaving the rosters without a rookie.
The absence of the arriving Stojakovic and departure of Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf means that the Kings actually have a Roster Player! I completely missed this when I talked about the final appearances of the original Roster Players in 1999 season releases, as I never thought to look beyond the Bulls’ roster in NBA Jam 99. The Kings’ placeholder is awkwardly named “Roster Guard2” to differentiate him from Not!Michael Jordan’s Roster Guard in Chicago. Calling them Bulls Guard and Kings Guard would’ve been a better way of avoiding doubling up on a placeholder moniker, but in any event, the Kings have a Roster Player standing in for two absentees in Peja and Abdul-Rauf.
Although Jam Mode doesn’t capture the classic NBA Jam vibe and spirit anywhere near as much as the manual promises, it does pay homage to previous games with some old school cheat codes. This includes Giant Mode, Tiny Mode, Team On Fire, Dunk From Anywhere, Tie Score, Super Push, and Make Next Shot. Of course, being On Fire is rather underwhelming in NBA Jam 99! Also, the Dunk From Anywhere code isn’t a power-up as in NBA Jam Tournament Edition, but instead needs to be punched in each time to then soar to the rim from your current spot on the court. The codes can also be used in NBA Play, though being On Fire doesn’t do anything there.
In a way, that sums up NBA Jam 99. There are traces of the brilliance of the original NBA Jam games, but they don’t even add to being a pale imitation. Obviously, the game was trying to move in a new direction, and in hindsight, there was merit to that idea. Midway’s NBA Hangtime had been the superior sequel to NBA Jam TE, with NBA Jam Extreme failing to capture the same magic as it tried to adapt the formula for the emerging 3D era. It made sense to try something new, especially as there was a precedent for competition in the sim space. Konami’s NBA in the Zone games also demonstrated that there was an audience for the sim-arcade hybrid style of gameplay.
The catch is that it also made it a competitor to NBA Live, rather than an alternative. Of course, even though NBA Live was the premiere sim basketball title at that point, other games still found an audience despite lacking the same popularity or critical acclaim. Unfortunately for NBA Jam 99, while it received some positive reviews, anyone who knew their stuff on the virtual hardwood could see that it wasn’t close to being a viable competitor. Not only is it a vastly inferior option to NBA Live 99 as a sim, but it’s alienating to NBA Jam fans thanks to barely resembling previous games. Instead of giving us the best of both worlds, it’s a terrible sim and arcade experience.
I’m hesitant to declare a title to be one of the worst basketball video games ever made. If nothing else, I don’t want to ignore the vast amount of ground between fantastic and terrible. Many games that aged poorly or were seen as bad in their day can be called mediocre, subpar, and even heavily-flawed, but few are complete disasters. However, I can honestly say that NBA Jam 99 is at the bottom of the barrel with NBA Live 07, ESPN NBA 2Night, and NBA 09. There were good intentions and ideas, but NBA Jam 99 is truly abysmal. It did very little right, and it isn’t fun to play. It’s long been considered an affront to the NBA Jam name, and it’s a reputation that’s well-earned.
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