NBA Jam for iPad coming soon

With the NBA season heading into playoff mode, EA Sports is due to release its over-the-top basketball game, NBA Jam for the iPad, any day. The game has actually been out for the iPhone for a few months for $4.99, but the iPad version has lagged behind it.

Whats interesting is that if you do a search for NBA Jam in Google, youll find several reviews and screenshots already up and even plenty of videos of the game running on iPads. However, its not for sale in the App Store. Whats the deal?

Well, if you happen to have a jailbroken iPad, you can download a $3 app from Cydia called RetinaPad that does a really nice job upscaling Retina-enabled iPhone apps from their 960x640-pixel resolution to the iPads 1,024x768-pixel resolution. As you can see from the image above (click it to enlarge it), the results are a whole lot better than just hitting the 2x button on an iPhone app, which just blows up the standard iPhone screen resolution (320x480 pixels) and generally looks soft and/or pixelated.

This makes you wonder why youre paying (in some cases) double the price for an iPad version of the same app for a bit of computer code that flips the resolution switch, so to speak. That said, we hope that the real iPad version of NBA Jam offers some extra features that the upscaled iPhone version doesnt have. We can only wait and see.

In the meantime, heres some gameplay video. We assume the guy who made this video is using RetinaPad since it was shot back in February.