When I received this game, I honestly thought it was an NBA JAM sequel, the long-time long-loved (atleast by me) arcade style basketball game by Acclaim.

This crazy illusion grew even stronger when I started playing the game. Could the controls be more like the original 16-bit versions of NBA JAM? The whole trick system, and gamebreakers which replaced the fiery ("IT'S ON FIRE!") ball? Wasn't this a refurnished NBA JAM for the last-gen consoles?

A friend of mine pointed out that NBA STREETS had nothing to do with NBA JAM. At first I even argued with him over that fact. But later I found it was true.

Well, if NBA STREETS isn't NBA JAM, then it's a damn good copy of it. (cfr. F-zero - nintendo vs. Wipeout - playstation)

The graphics are slick (the characters actually look shiny, as if they had been oiled up before playing or something). I hate to bring up the NBA JAM NBA STREETS comparison again, but NBA JAM has more spectacular moves than it's STREETS counterpart.

When it comes to sound, I have my complaints too: where are the nice hiphop beats I had been expecting when I put the game in my Cube? It's a damn basketball game and all it's accompanied with during the game are silly instrumentals.

Hold on, I'm not finished. Why on god's green earth does the game not allow over 2 human players on 1 team? Could it be because it would become unplayable? I don't know, but I was dissapointed in that issue. Maybe I'm a multiplayer snob.

When it comes to gameplay:
The game awards you with a gamebreaker when you fill up some kind of cool-moves meter. This meter can be filled by doing special moves.
You can do a "spectacular" shot which will add points to you and deduct from your opponent. Now, I really loved the gamebreaker idea which I first saw in NHL2K3 but that was because the gamebreaker was something cool: the game went into slowmotion (bullet-time as we're calling it nowadays) and allowed you to do some nice aimed shots, which were still hard to score. But in NBA STREETS the whole gamebreaker is just a silly way to let you do moves which you wouldn't do otherwise because frankly after 3 times they become boring.

So at first sight this gamelooks really cool, but I don'tthink that any serious gamer could play this game longer than a couple of hours.