NBA Hoopz


NBA Hoopz is a basketball video game by Midway. This game is the trilogy of NBA Hangtime and . Hoopz was the only 3-on-3, arcade-style basketball video game available during the 2000–01 NBA season.

Overview

Rather than 5 on 5 action like professional play, this game features 3 on 3 play. Using players from the NBA, each player chooses a guard, forward, and center from the team's NBA roster for the first half and can make substitutions for the second half.
NBA Hoopz is an arcade-style game and not meant to be realistic: players can jump twenty or thirty feet in the air, dunk the ball from away, and do otherwise physically impossible things. Fouls are only called on flagrant pushes, foul shots are rare, and there is no out of bounds. In addition, after a player makes three consecutive shots he becomes "on fire" which allows him to make almost any shot as well as goaltend without penalty. The PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast versions accommodate up to four players.

Features

The uniforms for the Orlando Magic and Phoenix Suns were not updated for the game. These teams sported the uniforms they had in the 1997-98 NBA season instead of the ones they had in the 2000-01 NBA season.

Reception

The Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 versions received "mixed" reviews, according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. GameZone gave the former console version universal acclaim, a few weeks before its release date. Rob Smolka of Next Generation said of the latter console version, "Sloppy dunk animations and a blatant lack of originality draws a technical foul on NBA Hoopz."