Producer: Epyx/US Gold
Retail Price: £8.99 cassette, £12.99 disk
Author: J Bagley and D Worton

Forget official tournaments, professional teams and airconditioned arenas - real basketball is played in the streets. All you need is a ball, a makeshift court and a couple of teams...

You can choose from a selection of four courts, including a playground, alley, suburban street and parking lot. A human or computer opponent (with three skill levels: easy, intermediate and tough) is selected. Team names are chosen and a coin is spun to determine who gets to select a team first. Three players, recruited from a gang of ten streetwise kids (each with their own abilities) make up each side.

The scene then switches to the horizontally scrolling court itself. Still portraits of each team member are depicted at the side of the screen, and one player is controlled at a time. Should the ball move out of his reach, control of another team member is assumed by pressing fire.

Various offensive moves can be performed: dribble, hook shot, slam dunk and jump shot. Running head-on into an opposition player dribbling the ball transfers possession. Pressing fire while facing one of your team-members initiates a pass. To shoot, a player needs to be in the correct position, facing the basket. At a press of the fire button he (or she) attempts the most appropriate type of shot, and the current score is displayed at the base of the screen.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: well drawn, transparent characters and colourful backgrounds
Sound: lacking in all respects
Options: one or two players, definable keys

Epyx has a reputation for excellent presentation and Street Sports Basketball matches up to expectation. The elaborate selection process, the spinning coin and the streetwise players create an atmospheric urban environment. Unfortunately the basketball lets it down. Control is extremely awkward: instead of automatically playing the team member that's nearest the ball, you have to toggle between the characters highlighted on the screen display, which is clumsy and time-consuming. The teams and characters are hard to distinguish on court; identifying your players is a matter of trial and error. This isn't so bad when there are two players but in terms of fluidity the game still leaves something to be desired. If you're after a really good sports simulation look elsewhere.
KATI [56%]

Streets Sports Basketball looked promising with its array of options, but the game itself has turned out to be pretty tedious. One of the main problems is the awful control method, where instead of control automatically passing to the nearest player to the ball, Match Day-style, you choose control of each player individually. This can lead to annoying mix-ups. Even when the control method is mastered, gameplay is very dull: scoring is simply a matter of running up to the basket and shooting when underneath it. Both teams are black and white making it difficult to tell whose side a player is on, the animation is very jerky, and sound virtually non-existent. Overall it's a pretty poor version of the sport.
PHIL [48%]

Hot on the heels of Basket Master a couple of issues back, comes another dose of Harlem Globetrotteritus in the shape of this mediocre basketball game from the Epyx stable. I found the presentation of the option screen to be good, but was not askeen on the actual gameplay. The main character sprites look and move like cardboard cut-outs; if this is indicative of the state of health of the kids who play Street Sports Basketball, I'm certainty glad that I'm an armchair sportsman. Not that I'll find myself coming back to it very much in the future, since the gameplay is far too easy. I'm afraid to say that Street Sports Basketball is a game to be missed.
MARK [46%]

US Gold
£8.99
Reviewer: Jonathan Davies

If phrases such as 'slam it through,' 'slow dribblers,' and 'pop 'em from the corners," mean anything to you, then you'd probably be better qualified to review this game than me. I'm afraid that corpuscle redistribution is more in my line, but I'll give anything a go.

Street Sports Basketball puts you in the dubious position of having control over a team of, ...yes, basketball players. Only three, admittedly, but we all have to start somewhere. Your side is picked from a selection of ten possibilities, none of whom I'd want to be seen with in public. Then either another player or the computer goes through the same ordeal to select the opposing team.

Having done this, and named the teams, you're now almost ready to start. But wait for it... you've still got to decide where to play. You can choose between such picturesque locations as the school playground, a back alley, a street out in the suburbs and even, for those romantic, poetic moments, a parking lot.

By the time you've got to this stage, you'll have endured hours of tape starting, stopping and turning over, some horribly average graphics, a beepy tune and, most stomach-churning of all, the original Sinclair character set! Urgh! And it would only take them 768 bytes to design a new one, he says knowledgeably.

Sadly, things don't improve a lot presentation-wise during the game, either. The players stagger around as if they're recovering from the side-effects of a particularly violent tandoori, none too inspiring when they're just about the only things that move in the whole game. The playing area is a small window in the centre of the screen, hemmed in by some close-ups of your team members, just in case you forget what they look like. That's just what I was trying to do, in fact.

And then we get onto problem number four hundred and sixty two: controlling your players. Rather than adopt the normal method of the guy (or girl, for a change), nearest the ball coming under your control, this game has plumped for a different system, whereby pressing fire flips between your players, unless one of them's got the ball, in which case it'll make him pass or shoot with it. Well I said it was different didn't I?

Having sussed that lot out, the next stage is to get hold of the ball. Not easy, I can tell you. Jiggling around next to the bloke you're trying to get it off sometimes works, but it's usually easier to wait till he takes a shot at the basket, invariably misses and lets you grab it. To have a go at shooting yourself (that wasn't meant to come out like that, but I came close at times!), position your player near the basket and press fire. Then it's mainly down to Lady Luck whether it goes in or not.

Which leads me (and rather neatly, I think), onto my next point. The main snag is that you simply haven't got a lot of control over what happens. The moves available to you are minimal and ball control is a very hit or miss affair. Compared to the likes of Match Day II with all its subtleties of gameplay, SS Basketball looks pretty poor.

No doubt this one will find a home with a select group of basketball fanatics out there, but I'd advise even them to give it a thorough checking out before parting with any of the folding (or jingling if you want to annoy the shopkeeper), stuff.

It's tough on the streets, as the bumph points out, especially after its been lying there for a few days (Eh? Ed).

Label: US Gold
Author: Jimmy Bagley
Price: £8.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

Yo! Slamdunk! Well crucial! Squoddlyl (I made that one up). All these are things which you might be expected to shout while playing Street Sports Basketball. As I understand it, stealing hubcaps or selling drugs in playgrounds, but Epyx tactfully decided to show them playing basketball instead.

You can play against the computer or another human, and the first task is to pick teams. You're shown a motley array of thugs with nicknames like The Slammer, Captain Hook and The Brain. There are even a couple of token girlies to add a bit of variation to the playing styles. Each player has his own characteristics; speed, powerful jumps, accurate passes or whatever; many also have disabilities, like Theo whose peaked cap sometimes slips over his eyes.

After spinning a computerised coin to decide who has first pick, the two players choose three 'dunkers' each. You then get to choose a background; playground, alley, suburban street or parking lot. Once everything has finally loaded - and this is a major three-cups-of-tea business - you can get on with playing the game. At each side of the screen appear the players for each team, while the play area scrolls left to right in the centre of the screen. The backgrounds are nicely detailed, but it doesn't seem to make much difference which one you choose to play against; oil slicks and high curbs are supposed to affect your performance, but I didn't really notice them.

Gameplay is at once simple and complicated, as silly oriental people say. All you have to do is move the chosen player around, blocking your opponent's moves, until it's time to tackle, pass or shoot for the basket, all of which are done by pressing the Fire button. Turning your back on an opponent makes it harder for you to be tackled, and type of shot, jump hook or slam dunk, is chosen automatically. The complicated part is that, unlike other sports simulations, where joystick control automatically passes to the character nearest to the ball, here you have to hold down the Fire button until the player you want to control is highlighted at the side of the screen. The problem is that you tend to forget to do this in the heat of the moment, and assuming that the closest player to the ball is under your control, you zoom off in the wrong direction and leave the mohicaned punk Pogo to slam in another.

You can set the number of points needed for a win before the game starts, but there's nothing much else in the way of sophistication, like penalty shots, time outs, fouls, all the little things which make basketball a sport rather than a game. So if it's an accurate simulation you're after, forget it.

Dreadful music and sound effects add nothing to the game. Overall a great deal of effort has gone into adding the illusion of sophistication to something which plays no better than the average budget game.