Ox Arcade
Full-court five-on-five with the real league roster. Every athlete's ratings come from their actual production on the floor.
Controls
- ←↑↓→
- Move, relative to the camera
- Shift
- Sprint
- Space
- Hold to aim, release to shoot
- Space↑
- Layup — finish at the rim
- X↑
- Dunk — drive at the rim with speed
- ←→
- Crossover — both together, on the move
- A
- Pass
- S
- Steal
- D
- Jump — block a shot or grab the board
- F
- Switch player (on defence)
- ASDF
- Inbounding — pick who to throw to
- Esc
- Pause
The shot meter is the skill. Hold shoot to fill it and release inside the green band for a bonus roughly as valuable as being wide open. Release early or hold too long and the shot suffers, even from a good shooter.
Finishing is a two-key move. Hold forward and press shoot to lay it in, or forward and X to throw it down. A dunk needs real speed at the rim — go up flat-footed and you’ll lay it in instead. Out of range, both fall back to a normal shot.
Cross them over on purpose. Press ← and → together while you are moving and the ball goes across your body — the two keys cancel out, so you come out of it driving straight. Cutting hard against a defender still crosses on its own. Either way you only get the step if there was someone there to beat, and a good defender will stay in front.
You always control the ball. Whoever catches it takes your controls automatically, so watch the white arrow — it moves to whoever you are steering, with their name under it. On defence, switch with F.
Inbound it where you want it. After the other team scores you step behind the baseline, and a letter appears over each of your team-mates. Press it and the ball goes to exactly that player — no guessing which one the pass button had in mind. You have eight seconds to get it in. You cannot walk it in from out there, so let the count run out and the ball goes the other way.
Arrows steer, letters play. Movement is relative to the camera, so up is always up the screen — the view swings behind whichever team is attacking, and your controls swing with it.
On a phone, a stick and buttons appear over the court. Everything is playable by keyboard alone.
Four two-minute quarters on Pro. Ratings come from each athlete's real production.
How the Ratings Work
Shooters convert at the rate they actually convert in the league. Each athlete's two-point and three-point percentages come straight from their box scores and become the baseline odds on every shot they take here, with distance, the defender and your release timing moving them off it. Speed, finishing and defense are read from the same stat lines.
Percentages are regressed toward the league average based on how many attempts they are built on, so one cold night in a three-game sample doesn't define a player. Any athlete can be pinned to hand-set ratings in the league admin. Add a player to a roster and they become playable here automatically — no separate game roster to maintain.
There are no fouls. That's a deliberate arcade choice, the same one NBA Jam made — free throws stop the game dead, and this is built to be picked up and played.
