NBA Hangtime

Oh dear. A conversion of an arcade and console two-on-two basketball game. With an NBA licence, which in itself translates as 'Oh good, an existing market of fans. We don't need to put any effort into this one. lads.' Unfortunately, this one didn't bode at aH well from the word go. NBA Hang Time features graphics that you'd expect in a Megadrive game, plus uninteresting, uninspinng gameplay, and a ludicrously cumbersome control system (although admittedly it was set up on a machine with a keyboard and an analogue joystick, as opposed to the joypad recommended). And, to compound the irritation absolutely everything in the game is done to a time limit. You have four minutes to work your way round the character creabon screen, including the clumsy console-style method of entenng names and numerical codes. At each quarter you have 10 seconds to confirm that, yes, you do want to continue the game you've started playing, and pressing the fire/shoot button just makes the countdown go faster.

If we were to attempt to find any redeeming features, we could mention the fact that when you create characters you can give them comedy heads, special features and have an almost RPG-like point allocation control over their attributes. We could mention that there are 150 top NBA players and more teams than we've heard of. We could mention that up to four people can play at once. We could mention the finger-twisting beat 'em up-style special moves Midway probably felt obliged to put in (though we couldn't find one to np out your opponent's heart).

But none of these excuses the shoddy and unresponsive controls, the unimpressive graphics, the grey and boring manual, the uninspinng gameplay, and the tact that NBA Hang rime is just plain shite.