After titling the first of these posts, I realized I had inadvertently written the phrase “Special Olympic” into the title. Coincidentally, as I am finding out, most of these games belong in the Special Olympics. It boggles my mind to wonder how much developers must have paid for these Olympic licenses, only to totally squander them, even way back in the day. Tonight, another one of those classic Olympic titles goes under the microscope, but is it worth playing? Let’s find out:



Basic Info

Team USA Basketball
Developer - Electronic Arts
Publisher - Electronic Arts
Console - Sega Genesis
Year - 1992



The premise



Ah, the mythical Dream Team. The 1992 Olympics in Barcelona were the year the USA first decided to send over all of their best basketball players to compete for the gold medal. They subsequently crushed everyone and inflated expectations for every single Summer Olympics to follow by beating a bunch of teams that were mostly stocked with mediocre players.

Electronic Arts apparently decided this would be a great idea for a basketball game, especially in America, and so, out came Team USA Basketball.

The game







Team USA Basketball is your pretty standard basketball game, featuring exhibition and tournament modes, international-style rules (5 fouls = fouling out, etc.), and all of the teams that qualified for the Olympics in 1992. However, this game truly exists for one reason and one reason only: to crush the world as Team USA. Seriously, why even bother playing as Lithuania or Canada? Even if you were from those countries, you still played as the American squad because they were simply better than every other team.

The controls

EA built this game off their NBA Playoffs series way back in the day, with Team USA Basketball a direct spin off of Bulls versus Lakers and the NBA Playoffs. Thus, the controls were identical to that game in just about every aspect. Since it was also on the Genesis, the controls are very basic, featuring pass, shoot and block buttons. It’s a little bland, but by the Genesis standards, it was pretty average.

The graphics and sound

The graphics and sound, as well, are pretty average, but the image they used for the referee looks kind of… odd…



Why he has his fist clenched and is looking up, I’ll never know. Is he excited that Patrick Ewing committed a foul? Perhaps. Maybe he’s a Celtics fan.

Also, for some reason, the court floor is the same for every game that’s played, even during the Olympics, displaying the Team USA logo at center court. At least it looks better than Double Dribble did.

The conclusion



Team USA Basketball is really just an Olympic spinoff of EA’s basketball games during the era, setting a trend that would be followed by generations of EA bosses to come: milk your franchises for every last penny by releasing the same game over and over again. The fact that Team USA itself is so dominant over everyone else did reflect reality, but it didn’t make for a very exciting game.

FINAL VERDICT: Aluminum Medal (5/10). What we have here is our pretty average basketball game, but the imbalance of Team USA vs. everyone else takes some of the fun away.