The best arcade games like NBA Jam are NBA Jam: On Fire Edition, NBA Street Vol. 2 and NFL Blitz. Below are 8, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to arcade costs you.
Filtering to arcade means you want short runs and a score, not a campaign. It is the right filter when what you liked was the one-more-go feeling.
What you get: A complete experience in twenty minutes, and a skill you keep. Arcade design is measured in the moment after you lose.
What made NBA Jam worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the arcade part of that answer, and only the arcade part.
The last proper entry, and the best-playing version of the formula.
The other great arcade basketball game, and just as stylish.
The same studio doing to American football what Jam did to basketball.
Arcade sport reduced to its purest competitive form.
The modern version of unserious sport with items.
The best arcade sports game currently being played.
Nintendo's arcade sports design from the same era.
Arcade-leaning sport that still plays properly.
Story and progression. Arcade games repeat on purpose, and if you want to be pulled somewhere they will not do it.
Specifically, these are strong answers for NBA Jam that are not arcade games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like NBA Jam — 9 picks, no genre filter.
NBA Jam: On Fire Edition. The last proper entry, and the best-playing version of the formula.
No. NBA Jam released on the Super Nintendo, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
They were designed to end. A machine that let you play for an hour on one coin did not earn its floor space, so difficulty was the business model.
Constantly, mostly by small teams. Several of the best beat-em-ups and run-and-guns of the last decade are new games built on forty-year-old design rules.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full NBA Jam list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is arcade — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the arcade guide for where to start in the genre generally.