14 DAY TRIAL // There has been quite a lot of controversy over EA's basketball franchises, with the full pledged NBA Elite 11 being delayed and the retro remake NBA Jam being shrouded in mystery for the past few weeks, but now a few more tidbits of information have been revealed, including the fact that the game will feature two unlockables teams of politicians.
Fans of NBA Jam will definitely remember that previous arcade iterations also feature politicians famous at that time, including Bill Clinton, but EA Sports has decided to really go for gold with the upgraded NBA Jam, featuring two teams, one for the Democrats and the other for the Republicans.
On the Democrat side we find the current President of the United States, Barrack Obama, as well as vice president Joe Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Al Gore.
Republicans will feature former president George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, John McCain, and Dick Cheney.
According to Trey Smith, the creative director of NBA Jam revealed a bit of insight on how the politicians got into the arcade basketball game.
"We found that it's pretty fun to take these politicians and add them in the game and not take them so serious. Instead of talking about all of these serious world issues, it's kind of fun to see the lighter side of politics. And just like we have the dunk faces of the NBA players where we grabbed high-resolution pictures of their game faces, we did the same thing with the politicians."
"We found these pictures that showed off the emotion of all of these politicians, and some of them are classic. Dick Cheney has the Darth Vader snarl. Obama makes some great faces, and the politician dunk faces are some of the best dunk faces in the entire game."
Smith says that players will have a lot of work to do in order to unlock all of these hidden characters, including the politicians, the famous Beastie Boys hip-hop band and other special ones, which the EA Sports exec declined to comment on.
All of these unlockable characters will only be available for the Nintendo Wii version, at least for the moment, as no concrete details were revealed about the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 editions.