In The Zone '98 is the second basketball offering so far for Nintendo 64 and unlike its only competition for the console, Midway's NBA Hangtime, the game strives to be a basketball simulation and not a sports-arcader. In other words, Konami has attempted to re-create the sport of basketball with as much emphasis on realism as possible. We don't know exactly what happened here, but we wish the development team could somehow make it un-happen. OK, so it's not quite that bad, but there are a number of problems, the first and most important being that the game is simply boring. It's generic, formula-basketball, with no thrills, no spills and no real excitement.
Players move slowly around the court, with sluggish response times that become frustrating at times.
The ball rolls to a dead-stop after one bounce and feels as if it is filled with sand, but none of this matters because players will be too busy mashing buttons in an attempt to figure out what's going on to ever see the ball, anyway. And while a number of options and moves are available, Konami's original control-scheme is ridiculous. It's as if the development team studied the very best way to set-up the controllers for a perfect gaming experience and then did the opposite. Luckily, the game's control-scheme can be modified to a player's liking, but we're still left to wonder what Konami was thinking with the original setup. The artificial intelligence for players is dead-on sometimes and totally clueless others.