This is one of those FMV games that tarnished the Sega CD's reputation. The game is one-on-one basketball from an over the shoulder perspective where you have to earn enough respect points (1 billion of them) to be able to play Scottie Pippen. The four opponents you have to repeatedly play against each has their own CD. So, yeah, it's a 4-CD game (Pippen is on all four discs) -- luckily, you don't have to change discs unless you want to change opponents. During the games, you have to either take advantage of openings in their defense to drive and slam on your opponent, or you can try shooting a jumper, or while on defense figure out when they try to drive and attempt to steal or at least close down their driving lane. Since each of the 4 non-Pippen opponents have dozens of sequences, you can either use a guide (like I did, although I had to add several missing sequences) or go into training mode, where it shows you when to do the required action, and create your own crib sheet. Pippen has significantly fewer of these sequences. Each sequence can be distinguished by what they do before either passing you the ball if you're on offense or you passing to them when you're on defense. At that point, all you have to do is refer to your sheet and you'll be successful the vast majority of the time.
It does have about a half dozen different lengths of game to choose from, either going to a certain point total or a timed game, so you can choose the longer games to rack up a ton of points. It ended up taking me 25 games (I reloaded if I lost respect points from the game, so I probably played closer to 40 games) to get the required 1 billion respect points to play Pippen. Of course, being called Slam City, you get a lot more respect points from a slam dunk rather than a jumper, with crazy NBA Jam-type super slams if you time your break to the basket, or stealing from your opponent, just right netting even more respect points.
While I did get a chuckle from a few of the interspersed cutscenes, the game is just a repetitive chore to play. Extremely surprisingly, there is no noticeable load times during the games. Since there is a 10-second shot clock, the gameplay sequences are all pretty short. The other scenes are also almost all pretty short. The longest sequence, other than the opening movie, is when you choose to play Pippen, but this one fortunately can be skipped. Interestingly, while Nike gets mentioned several times throughout as well as having a van full of Nike shoe boxes prominently displaying the Nike swoosh logo, there's no mention of Nike and its trademark being used with permission in the game, manual, or on the game's packaging.
Lucky me, I also have the re-release that requires both the Sega CD and 32X, so I'll get to play through this again at some point when I knock that out of my backlog.
