''College Slam'' is a

college basketball College basketball is basketball that is played by teams of Student athlete, student-athletes at universities and colleges. In the Higher education in the United States, United States, colleges and universities are governed by collegiate athle ...

video game A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual fe ...

published by Acclaim. It was released for the

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, and PC. It includes most major Division I colleges, but some, such as the

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, the

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, and

Mississippi State University Mississippi State University for Agriculture and Applied Science, commonly known as Mississippi State University (MSU), is a Public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Mississippi State, Mississippi, Un ...

(who had just made a run to the Final Four that year), are not included. The player can play tournaments, a season, or a single game. Many gaming critics accused it of being a thinly veiled repackaging of ''

NBA Jam ''NBA Jam'' is a List of basketball video games, basketball video game series based on the National Basketball Association (NBA). Initially developed as arcade games by Midway Games, Midway, the game found popularity with its photorealistic digi ...

''.

Gameplay

Each team starts out by picking any two out of five players to play with during the game. During timeouts, and at half-time, the player has a choice to make substitutions. When a player makes two baskets in a row, the announcer says "He's heating up", and if he makes three baskets in a row without the other team scoring, he says "He's on fire!", which makes it easier to score. In the season mode, the player can pick from 44 teams, and then play a 20-game season against quality competition. In the tournament mode, 16 teams compete for a chance to win the national championship. The player also has the ability to edit teams and players. Like ''NBA Jam'' before it, the gameplay is goofy, but yet competitive as players can easily make full-court shots off and on and can score 3 in a row to get a flaming ball. Occasionally the college ball players can get struck by lightning as they dunk.

Reception

The two sports reviewers of ''

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'' gave the PlayStation version scores of 6.0 and 5.5 out of 10. Though they acknowledged that some players would find the college license appealing, they remarked that the game differs too little from ''

'' to stir real interest, with one of them noting that "Some of the players look exactly the same as they did in Jam except for a color palette change." Tommy Glide and Greasy Gus of ''

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'' concurred that the game retains the fun of ''NBA Jam'', but that the new alley-oops and player substitutions do not significantly enhance the game, leaving ''College Slam'' a pointless clone. Reviewing the Genesis version, a ''

Next Generation Next Generation or Next-Generation may refer to: Publications and literature * ''Next Generation'' (magazine), video game magazine that was made by the now defunct Imagine Media publishing company * Next Generation poets (2004), list of young ...

'' critic argued that even the college licensing does nothing for the game, since it does not use real players and in some cases gets the teams' uniform colors wrong. He scored it 2 out of 5 stars. In 1996, ''

Computer Gaming World ''Computer Gaming World'' (CGW) was an American Video game journalism, computer game magazine that was published between 1981 and 2006. One of the few magazines of the era to survive the video game crash of 1983, it was sold to Ziff Davis in 199 ...

'' declared ''College Slam'' the 11th-worst computer game ever released.

References

External links

* 1996 video games Acclaim Entertainment games Acclaim Studios Austin games College basketball video games in the United States Game Boy games Multiplayer and single-player video games North America-exclusive video games PlayStation (console) games Sega Genesis games Sega Saturn games Super Nintendo Entertainment System games Torus Games games Video games developed in the United Kingdom Windows games {{basketball-videogame-stub