NBA Live 96

Basketball is the only 'American' sport that actually originated in America. American football, for example, is just rugby for people who are too impatient to pass the ball backwards all the time. Baseball, so often written about by sentimental US sportswriters as the epitome of all that America stands for, originated here in England, too. and even gets mentioned - as "base ball" - in the first chapter of the classic novel Northanger Abbey.

Ice hockey originated in Scandinavia (originally played by Viking hordes with the stiffened, severed legs of their conquered foes for sticks and the top off a jar of rollmop herrings for a puck). But basketball was invented in America, by one Elmer Basket. Basket, freakishly tall thanks to being injected with Baby-Bio as a child by an irresponsible parent with nothing better to do, invented the sport solely to humiliate his vertically-challenged friends. Nailing an orange crate high up on the wall of the local gymnasium, he would spend countless hours plopping an inflated buffalo bladder into it and shouting, "Two points!". Later, to encourage a more open game, he began standing further away and throwing it in, shouting, "Three points!". Thus was basketball born.

Electronic Arts are no stranger to basketball games - or sports games in general, come to that. In fact over the years, they've become to sports games what Anthea Turner is to the lottery: inextricably linked in the eyes of the public. If you count up their basketball titles alone, the total number released, across every format, including annual upgrades, comes to 3,287. So they should know what they're doing by now.

Options

There's more than one way to fry pork fat, as my old mother used to say before she gave up her health food shop, and there's more than one way to play NBA Live 96. There are three levels of difficulty and you can play exhibition games or a full 12,000-game season (approximately).

Or you can cheat a little, and go straight for the play-offs. Don't get too excited though, you won't be straight through to a semi-final. In the true American way, administrators like to get as many teams as possible through to the playoffs to keep those fans rolling in and maximise television advertising revenue for as long as possible. In the case of basketball, this means... er, basically everyone gets through.

Well almost. Anyway, you can play in Arcade mode or Simulation mode, or you can select Custom, choosing which rules you're going to play by. You can switch them all on or off, including backcourt violations, travelling, fouling and charging, the 3-seconds in the key, 5-seconds in-bound and 10-seconds halfcourt rules, and even the out-of bounds rules (at this point I suppose I should apologise to confusing non-basketball fans with the game's terminology here, but well, what the hell).

Teamsters

Every NBA team is available, and EA have done a reasonable job of making the more recognisable players in each squad... well, recognisable. Anyone with a shaved head, for example, actually has a shaved head. And players are different heights (ranging from exceptionally tall, through to absurdly tall to inhumanly tall). Tattoos, moles, shaving cuts and other distinguishing features are too small to tell whether they're accurate representations. There's also the usual range of divisional All-Star teams, along with teams who typify, if you will, a certain style of play or philosophical outlook: Stealers are a team consisting of profound believers in the notion of the redistribution of wealth; Blockers are a team who subsist entirely on constipation-inducing foodstuffs; and so on.

Presentation

EA have opted once again for TV-style presentation, and as we've come to expect, it's immaculately put together: voice-overs introduce the 'show', and photographs of each team's starting line-up are displayed - unfortunately though, these don't come with suitable comments. It could have done with stuff along the lines of, "Madeupname Smith may have the highest three-pointer percentage in the league, Bob, but he is one ugly son of a bitch." Ah well. In-game music is suitably funky and there are frequent snatches of music during the game itself, as though played over the PA system, which all adds to the atmosphere. You even get trivia questions at the half-time break.

And the game itself incorporates EA's ubiquitous Virtual Stadium technology, which means up to four different angles for each camera. Sadly, the televisual presentation doesn't extend to the game being interrupted at crucial moments to show advertisements for haemorrhoid treatments, but you can't have everything.

Flaw show

What with all the fancy presentation, first impressions are very good. And when you start playing, you find that the game is fast (if a little 'slippery') with intuitive controls, reasonably well-animated player sprites, as well as being playable in both one- and two-player modes. (It's even playable using the keyboard.) Potential basketball fun galore, in fact. The in-game graphics, however, are a bit muted and 'Habitaty', and the 'crowd', frankly, looks laughably flat - a common problem in Virtual Stadiums, it seems. It's also sometimes hard to see who has the ball when the game gets crowded under the hoops, and against the computer, especially, this usually means you end up conceding points and missing rebounds. These graphical shortcomings aside, though (which is ironic given the emphasis placed on the Virtual Stadium presentation), NBA Live 96 is still a good game.

Scrap! Scrap!

It's nice to see that Electronic Arts have introduced a more accurate representation of the level of violence in basketball. No longer are you restricted to girlie attempts at snatching the ball from opponents: you can now give them an elbow in the teeth, or a nasty hi-top to the nads, or whatever, and send them crashing to the deck. Much more like the real thing, although knives still seem to be kept firmly in waistbands.

Free throws

Get fouled in the act of shooting and of course it's straight off to the free throw line, where you'll be presented with this cross-shaped target - variations of which have been around since Lakers vs Celtics, all those years ago on the Mega Drive. The ball moves sideways across it, then up and down, at a speed dependent on how good the fouled player is at shooting. The idea is to press the fire button at the target's centre each time. Aim a bit skew whiff though and the ball bounces off in the wrong direction, provoking another fierce bout of fisticuffs among the waiting behemoths. Get it right and your salary goes up by another million dollars.