Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by John DeGiorgio

Temps are dropping, leaves are changing, and basketball is coming inside. The NBA season is about to kick off and, as is customary, here come the games. Sony is bringing Kobe Bryant in all his glory to your PSP this year with NBA 07. Not a straight port of the PS2 version of the game, the PSP is lacking 'The Life' portion of it's console big brother. I'm guessing this means no trips to Colorado for rehab or alercations with with the paying customers, but missing this feature might turn out to be a good thing!

Having never played a Sony NBA game I was looking forward to getting my hands on this one. Sony has done a pretty good job with baseball and soccer on their handheld (I even liked Gretzky Hockey) so I was ready for some hoops for the PSP. It seems that they've figured out that, either they can't compete with the likes of EA when it comes to the PSP or that they shouldn't. Sony has show a great ability to add twists in the form of new gameplay modes and tons of mini-games to keep things quick and fun on a handheld. Is this another layup or are we going to get Shaq at the line?

Most of the players somewhat resemble their real life counterparts, albeit a little cartoony in detail. The courts are nice enough and what you can see of the buildings are fine. The bulk of you playtime may end up on the streets or other, interesting locations like an arcade or dodgeball court. Everything is done to a certain level of mediocrity.

There didn’t appear to be too many glaring graphical screw-ups that effected gameplay, like some other hoops games on the market right now. Everything moves at a swift pace and the animations, although a bit forced, were pretty smooth and relevant to the action on the court. There were only a few instances where I saw players reaching through one another or the David Copperfield tricks where the ball disappears for an instant and shows up somewhere else. The ball phsysics are otherwise solid, bounces off the rim and backboard predictably as well.

One thing you will notice is that there's a ton of advertising in the game. From T-Mobile to Spaulding to a whol lot of TNT. While it adds a little to the feel, the main reason for the ads might be the same for Sony as it is for the NBA; to make extra revenue. Doesn't hurt to have all the adds present but it is something you will notice.

There isn't much more to say about the look of the game, we aren't dealing with elves or spells here people, it's basketball on a handheld. Lighting effects and real time damage modeling don't play that big of a role when you look to buy a hoops game. It comes down to your ability to play the game and tell the difference between players on the court. You can tell the difference between the players. Now, onto the play on the court.

You may want to sit down for this because there may be some of you out there who are shocked at what I’m going to tell you. There is hip-hop music in the game. I know, I know, you’re probably saying to yourself, "What a refreshing change of pace for a sports game!" Sometimes a game will come along and do something special that changes the way we think of a genre by just doing one simple thing different than everybody else. The audio in NBA ’07 is not that game.

Plug through the menus and you’ll hear squeaks and bounces to go along with the no-frill but no-problem announcing tandem of Ian Eagle and Mark Jackson when you get to the court. Once again, there are no canons being fired or spells cast, there's no 5.1 DTS at work and Lucas hasn't given this puppy THX certification. At best you're playing basketball in an packed NBA arena, at worst you're shooting around in an empty one. I could go on and on about the particular acoustics of every arena, the dodgeball court and arcade but I'm guessing you care about these things as much as I do since they have no real impact on the game and your enjoyment of it.

Standard controls for what you can do with a PSP. The one thing that may cause problems control wise is that there are so many mini-games and other things to do outside standard basketball, that it might take a game or two to get used to the controls for the specific thing event that you’re involved in.

Every mini-game has it's own set of controls and layouts. For instance, if you get yourself into a game of "H-O-R-S-E" the control pad serves as a way to set up your shot type. You can pick between jumper, layup, bank shot or hook. This is in contrast to playing pinball where you only use the shoulder buttons.

The variey of controls schemes all come together with the same quick responsiveness which is needed in a game that gives players this much speed. NBA '07 plays a little quick and is tuned well for that style of play. The lack of a second stick doesn't have an impact on the controls for NBA like it does with some other PSP games but the full compliment of buttons are used in a logical manner depending on the game your playing and, after a few minutes in, whatever Sony throws at you will become second nature.

The gameplay in NBA ’07 is a mixed bag. It’s pretty standard on-court action. I felt that players moved around the court realistically and helped out when they had the chance for the most part. I didn’t notice players like Shaq hanging out at the free-throw line or Earl Boynkins trying to clear out underneath. There was no sense of dismay when walking your offense up the court or getting in formation on the defensive side. Other than the few issues mentioned below, it played a surprisingly good game of fundamental hoops. The issues, however, are game breakers.

One gameplay mechanic that stands out is the shot ring. In other basketball games the visual cue you would get for shooting is trying to time the release of the shot button with the high point release of the shooter. NBA ‘07 has added a second dimension to this in which a halo appears around the ball as you are shooting. The goal is to release the ball/button when the halo turns green. I thought this would be helpful when I started but it actually killed me. Part of this is due to breaking the habit of the ‘old school’ shot mechanism that I’ve grown accustomed to, but the bigger issue is with the inconsistency of the ring itself. Sometimes it’s green for a split second, sometimes it’s green for most of the shot, and sometimes it’s never green. I understand the fact that the duration of the green halo is going to depend on the players skill, shot selection and how close he’s being guarded so I dragged my ass into the shootaround  mode from some practice. I took shots over and over again from the same spot on the floor and got wildly varying results. It was as if I was using different players under all different situations. This definitely presents a problem when you’re out on the court. It got to the point that I was almost exclusively relegated to dunks and lay-ups. I was my own little version of SportsCenter, driving the lane and yelling “booyeah!” every trip down the court.

This leads me to my next problem. Taking away my shots with an inconsistent shooting halo and adding a charge-inducing defense is not going to get it done. While I like the fact that I really couldn’t run through the paint at will, why do I almost stick to the opposing player who’s standing in my way? There are some moves that may allow you to  get past some traffic out further on the court, once you find yourself in close to the basket you better be passing out of the one man trap that you’ll find yourself in so you can try the whole thing again. This is not a problem for the CPU offense as they ran around me like I wasn’t there.

There are also some other quirky AI issues as well. The CPU tends to break up passes way too easily. By breaking them up, I mean it’s almost like your passes are going off opposing players elbows too, they rarely make clean steals so the ball usually gets deflected wildly somewhere on the court.

Wrapping it up, it seems that your players want to stop to receive a pass making fast breaks somewhat impossible too. Did anyone see this in testing? Things went from bad to worse most trips up the court.

How can a game with so many flaws actually draw you back for more? The mini-games. There are tons of other things to do in NBA ’07 than hit the courts for a regulation game. There are things like dodge-ball, skee-ball and even the pop-a-shot machine from arcades and bars, just to name a few. The most intriguing of these is the conquest mode. This is best described as an NBA-Risk. You take your selected team out for global domination of the USA. In a turn based round that includes all teams, you can be ‘attacked’ and make one offensive maneuver yourself. If you are called on to defend your turf and lose, your attacking foe gets your turf and your team, if you fend them off, you get to make a dream deal by swapping any one of your players for any one of theirs. That’s the basic flow, but things become more complicated when you get more land. Every time you take over an entire team and get their players and city, you now get the chance to spread out your ‘hoops army’ and fill the rosters of your entire domain. This presents the challenge of not spreading your stars too thin or you’ll become prey in someone else’s takeover. As you can see, this adds a great twist to a somewhat tired genre. I’m calling for every sports game made to include this mode, forever!

Oh, and there are some pretty decent online gaming to be found here as well

Just like Sony’s soccer game on the PSP this year, NBA ’07 presents some great ideas to go along with a different style of gameplay to make things fresh. Unlike soccer though, basketball from Sony decided to substitute flawed gameplay where World Tour Soccer gave us something refreshing, and, well, good. This is a shame because even though I knew, and became frustrated with the gameplay, I couldn’t stop going back to the mini-games, especially conquest. As much as I wanted to like it, I couldn’t recommend NBA ’07 to any of you out there, especially if you’re interested in actually playing basketball.

Gaming Trend Score

71

1. Graphics: 75
2. Audio: 65
3. Controls: 75
4. Gameplay: 60
5. Value/Replay: 90
6. OVERALL:71