Original Release: Accolade, 1993, Genesis
Other Releases: SNES (1994)
Two-on-two street ball with Chuck and about a dozen random schmos.
Barkley: Shut Up and Jam (Genesis, 1993, Accolade)
Where to Buy: Amazon
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
I don’t know why Accolade didn’t just go ahead and call this Barkley Prison Yard Basketball. It’s basically an NBA Jam clone with the steal function replaced by rude elbows to the face, and the removal of “On Fire” mode. There are also no NBA teams or players other than Sir Charles – just a bunch of random Thugz Who Need Hugz (I like playing as Sweet Pea from Brooklyn and Smoothy D from Oakland – I call them the Jamba Jammers.)
The games take place in a handful of major U.S. cities, in a bunch of “street” themed backgrounds like a beachside court, some ghetto chain-link-fenced court, etc. All matches are two-on-two a la Jam, and you can play Exhibition, a series of “best out of X” games, or a tournament. The action is accompanied by Barkley’s poorly digitized voice telling you, among other things, to “play hard or go home” and “pick up the damn ball!” However, between the horribly low quality they sampled the voice clips at and Barkley possibly being heavily sedated on cough medicine or something, it doesn’t even really sound like him at all, and half the time you’ll struggle to make out what the hell he’s trying to say.
The computer always plays poorly, except for Sir Charles who just annihilates you when you get near him and takes the ball away constantly. All of the CPU players have predictable AI routines and are easy to run around and score threes and dunk on, making the game little challenge once you master the basic controls. The saving grace is that up to four human players can play, but if you don’t have more than two and the appropriate hardware, the game is kinda a clunker and just makes you want to play some Jam instead. Blatant knockoff and not a very good one, though it executes the fundamentals fairly decently.
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