I won a tournament against all 7 opponents with 3 of the 8 characters. Tournaments are best of 5 and each game takes about 5 minutes with short quarters or about 10 min with long qtrs.
This is an interesting take on basketball. The characters are sentient basketballs with hands and feet (in that style with no arms or legs to connect them to their basketball bodies a la Rayman (except this released about a year before Rayman)) and you play by getting yourself through the rims by bouncing yourself off of your opponent. The game is completely free-flowing with no time stoppages other than the ends of the quarters. You can score on either of the 2 baskets (or 3 baskets on some courts) at any time. There are 7 different courts with various themes, such as a graveyard where the baskets are the rib cages of skeletons, the surface of a moon with low gravity and the baskets move around a bit, a jungle with monkeys holding their arms in a ring for the baskets plus a volcano that puts out smoke rings that float across the sky for a third basket, an underwater court, etc. This does give it some nice variety. If you choose to play a single game, you get the choose the venue, while if you choose to play a tournament, the venues are randomly chosen with no repeats. There are also power ups and power downs that vary between the courts -- you can disable these or make them appear more frequently.
While there are 8 characters to play as, other than how they look, there are no differences in their skills when you control them. They do have different levels of difficulty when the CPU controls them, though. Each character has its own couple minute movie that you can watch from the options menu. They're kinda cute to watch. The manual suggests that this game was planned to have a cartridge release (which apparently never happened), as it states these cartoons are only available on the CD release.
The biggest problem with the game is that, other than on the moon court, you have next to no control after you jump. If you don't get bounced high by your opponent, you'll bounce on the ground once before landing on your feet and are able to move again. This isn't so bad. When you get bounced high is when it becomes frustratingly annoying, as, unless you have the sticky shoes power up, you'll bounce at least a half dozen times before regaining control. This makes the hardest opponents a lot more difficult, since when you score on a few of the courts, 9 times out of 10, they'll use this to immediately score on the same basket you scored on. You also can't do anything if you're bouncing on your opponent and the higher difficulty opponents will sometime get under you and have you bouncing off its head for half the quarter or more, which really sucks the fun out of the game.
The game supports 4-players with a multitap, which I could see as being a fun diversion for a get together. I think it would be better if the tournament was an actual tournament against all of the opponents instead of being a single best of 5 series against one opponent. All in all, I'd say this is worth a try if you can find it for $5 or $10.
