NBA Hangtime

The gameplay is largely the same as Midway's NBA Jam games, with some additions. One of the most prominent additions is the "Create Player" feature, which allows players to create a custom basketball player, specifying height, weight, power, shooting, and defensive skills using a limited number of attribute points. Created players can be made more powerful as players earn additional attribute points by winning games.

The game retains many of the same rules of NBA Jam: Tournament Edition, including the two-on-two match ups, statistics tracking, legal pushing and "on fire" mode. Additions to the gameplay include spin moves, alley oops and double slam dunks - a slam dunk performed after one team member in the middle of a dunk passes to the other member. Alley-oops and double dunks can trigger the new "team fire" mode in which both team members are on fire.

Computer and Video Games dubbed Hangtime "the real, and quite worthy, successor to NBA Jam TE". The graphics improvements were lauded, as were the new features, moves and the created player feature. A reviewer for Next Generation likewise attested that "NBA Hangtime has all the playable qualities of NBA Jam, plus a slew of perks that make this worthy of your arcade quarters." He was particularly impressed with the Create a Player mode, and said the fact that this costs an extra quarter is more than balanced by the fact that the custom player is permanently written into the arcade cabinet's memory. Despite this, he scored it only 3 out of 5 stars.

The home ports received mixed reviews. In contrast to their reviews for the arcade version, most critics remarked that the game does not offer enough new features over NBA Jam, though they disagreed as to how much of a problem this is. Reviewing the Nintendo 64 version, GamePro concluded that "Jam-style hoops is nothing new, but Hangtime does it with enough flash and freshness to keep you happily dunkin' like a fool." They cited the selection of players, numerous secrets, smooth graphics, multiplayer matches, and create-a-player mode.