We're shooting 3 on 3 street basketball. If you wanna join in you gotta answer the call! Here we have Data East's Street Hoop, aka Street Slam and Dunk Dream. This is a 3 on 3 arcadey street basketball game released for the Neo Geo arcade and home systems. The gameplay is really good here and you build up a super meter that lets you access a super dunk. This game should probably be in the running alongside Midway's basketball titles for best arcade basketball.
The main stand out feature of Street Hoop is of course it's soundtrack. Lots of smooth hip hop being crunched down to play through wonderful Neo Geo ADPCM playback. The Neo Geo is equipped with a Yamaha YM2610, or OPNB as it's also known, to provide 4 voice FM synthesis, 3 square wave/noise tone channels, and 7 ADPCM channels, 6 of which at 18.5 kHz sampling rate. Hence the wonderfully crunchy yet memorable jams we have here. This game also received a Neo Geo CD home release with an arranged soundtrack if you'd like to hear the clean and crisp vocals. Here though I've uploaded the crunchy Neo Geo ADPCM because damn it's good.
This game would also get a sequel in the form of Dunk Dream '95, aka Data East's Hoops. This was released on Data East's own MLC system hardware which featured a YMZ280B and provided slightly higher fidelity PCM/ADPCM playback. The soundtrack to Dunk Dream '95 is also pretty good but I still prefer Street Hoop's over it. Maybe it's the extra crunchiness, I don't know.
Seeing these games again makes me imagine a world where Data East didn't crumple and instead released a basketball game starring their iconic characters. Imagine Karnov (who makes a cameo on 2 of Street Hoop's courts) inflating like a balloon and then dunking over Joe & Mac. Peter Pepper breaking Chelnov's ankles. The Two Crude dudes facing off against the Bad Dudes to see just who is the baddest. But alas, it was not to be. The MLC was a failure with only 4 titles and Data East would withdraw from the arcade business 2 years later.