NBA Street Vol. 2

PS2 review by Jim Smith - Wednesday 21st May 2003

They're playing basketball.
We love that basketball.

Basketball is a sport that has always been close to my heart. I grew up in the East Midlands in a footballing town and went to a very sporty secondary school. It was so sporty, as it goes, that they actually had basketball nets in the playground, so I basically shot hoops with my basketball mad mates every lunchtime for five years and left the footballing kids to it. This was the late eighties, you know, also the time when the BBC had the good sense to show NBA highlights on a Saturday night, so come Monday we'd all try to copy the tricks we'd just seen our b-balling heroes pulling off. It was actually quite a site seeing tonnes of school kids in ropey school uniforms all trying to do the Magic Johnson hook shot, or the Jordan finger roll. Hell, I was convinced I was Larry Bird for a while, it was great; at fifteen years old I could just about pull off a fairly ugly dunk. It wasn't real American street basketball, I'll give you that, but to us it was just about close enough.



All this youthful enthusiasm went out the window as soon as I went to college, though. Being essentially weak willed I ended up abandoning my favourite sport for the lure of drinking myself stupid and chasing girls all the time, but I still have all those fond playground court memories.

Basketball is my favourite sport,
I like the way they dribble up and down the court.

And the thing is, basketball should make a great sports video game. It's fast, exciting, high scoring and very flashy; the ideal components for a great sports game, you would think. It's a shame then that at the time all the basketball video games concentrated on recreating the rules laden, stop-start drama of the official NBA and ignored the more free-flowing, all singing all dancing street version of the game. That was until NBA Jam turned up on the scene in the early nineties. The uncluttered, fast break, give and go styling of that title was an immediate hit with arcade junkies the world over. Hell, I was such a fan that I was inspired to write my first legitimate article; a four page players guide for NBA Jam :TE on the good old SNES, published in Super Play, a popular UK SNES magazine of the time, nearly a decade ago. Jam was the first game to abandon the five a side rule which consoles struggled with and opt for two a side instead. All of a sudden the courts were much more open and you therefore had the room to move around a bit and actually play good basketball. It also gave you the opportunity to have powerful defensive moves, stripping away the so-called 'non-contact sport' restrictions of the real thing. Thankfully, NBA Street seems to have evolved directly from these concepts, although the new breed of consoles can now happily manage three a side, adding next-generation icing to the cake. Well it's about time. Thank you EA Big.

Just like I'm the king of the microphone,
So is Dr. J and Moses Malone.

EA Big can do no wrong at the moment. Not only have they recently released the really pleasing Def Jam Vendetta only a few months ago Stateside, they've pulled out all the stops with this baby too. Where other unofficial sports games would have been happy to sit on their laurels (like all the knock off tennis games we've had over the years) EA have gone and collected one hundred and seventy real NBA players to prove their worth on the street courts. And not just current players, we've got many all time all stars too. Remember Magic Johnson? He's here. Dr. J? He's here too. Larry Bird? Uh huh. Michael Jordan, his airness himself? Oh yeah, and in a big way. NBA Street gives you not one, not two, but three MJs, all from different time periods in his illustrious career, from rookie to a Chicago Bulls All-Star and finally a Washington Wizards veteran. Amazing really; Jordan was never in NBA Jam because they couldn't afford the licence. Times really do change.



Bells and whistles aside, Street 2 really does have one of the sweetest basketball game engines that I've ever seen. It seems to live symbiotically within a very clever graphics engine, in which the protagonists on the court seem to be constantly aware of everything else that is going on around them. This sounds obvious, but it's actually been the downfall of many basketball sims in the past; the fact that coders used to get away with letting players just stand there looking pretty vacant until the ball arrives in their hands. On offence here your players keep their heads up all the time, and often keep one eye on the ball wherever they are; be they waiting for a pass, setting a screen, making a run, whatever. Defensively, the game shines too. Players run when needed, wave arms around to block passes if that's necessary or drop into a low defensive stance to simply cover their mark if nothing else is going on. They'll even do stuff you'd only attribute normally to human players, like if their mark is out of the play and they see their team mate beaten one-on-one, they'll step across to help out. Or, vice versa, they'll head across and mark the open man if you've switched across to help him first, just like real players would in a real game of street ball in the real, real world. Pretty corny, don't you think?

But what's not corny is the amount of options available to you all the time. Imagine you get passed the ball from the baseline and your team mates steam down court, as you'd expect. You dribble up slowly, pulling a few dribbling tricks along the way if your marker gives you room. Tricks are done by tapping square while dribbling, or tapping square in conjunction with any combination of the shoulder buttons, which are all turbo. Bare in mind that each combination of R1, R2, L1 and L2 produces different trick dribbles and even though remembering what does what is daunting at the start, you soon find yourself learning which combinations work better in any given scenario. Anyway, while tricking, you've got one eye on your team mates to see what they're doing. Sometimes they work themselves open and gesticulate wildly at you to pass, which can be quite funny. On rare occasions, you'll witness one of your team mates deck their marker and leap up for the alley-oop; thank you easy score. More often than not, though, they need a bit of directing. Flick the right analogue towards a player and you'll pass that way but keep control of your man, so you can move into an open position and ask for it back with X. Or, if you're feeling adventurous, flick it away with the right analogue, weave to the net, hit O (which should be a shot although in this scenario launches the player rimwards), hit X quickly to ask for the ball back mid-flight and watch in delight as your airborne player slams it home. The right analogue is the key, actually, since you can also use it to set picks. Simply press it in and one of your mates beelines it across and sets a pick on your marker. You don't need me to tell you that off a good pick, options are aplenty. Take a quick open long range bomb, roll off to a mate or simply drive the open lane to the basket for a dunk; the world is your oyster. And boy, are the dunks sweet. They run on the same premise as tricks; O with any combination of the shoulder buttons produces a different slam. Different, but equally beautiful.

I like slam-dunks, take me to the hoop,
My favourite play is the alley-oop.

Defence too is well handled. You have the expected arsenal of steals to hit lazy dribblers and turbo steals to counter anyone going too trick-crazy, but it often pays to bide your time and wait for them to make their move. It only takes one small mistake and, bang, they're past you, and that can be the difference between winning and loosing; sickening when you discover how powerful blocks are. Yes, as Bobbito Garcia the commentator points out in one of the accompanying movies, rarely is defence as much fun as offence, but here it is. Blocks are amazing, huge in fact. Players with sky high block stats seem to cross the court in a single bound and swat balls from the air like flies and it's a joy to behold. This is the real trick, you see, offence and defence are both as much fun, it's always tight and games really can become a spectacle.



So soon enough you start, you feel the flow, it all becomes easy, your fingers do the talking on their own and your mind becomes occupied with other things; like how cool the background graphics are, for example. On the street courts the guys watching cheer regularly, cars drive past idly and passers by stop to have a wee look at what's going on, it's great. It's even surprising how bearable the commentary is; I'd even go as far to say it's very funny at times, my favourite one-liner being, "Is there a doctor in the house, 'cause that was SICK!" All in all you get this very calming sense of well being, like you're back in the playground with a few mates, maybe in the late seventies or something, leagues away from the hard line ghetto hip-hop mentality I was expecting. It's a credit to EA Big that they've pulled this off; in this hood you get the impression that everyone's nice to each other and nobody ever gets taxed for their sneakers, no way.

Gamebreakers have come a long way from the first game and they provide an even more important role than they did last time. I find myself constantly glancing at the gamebreaker bar, always pushing combo'ed trick after trick. In Street vol. 2 you can actually bank the first gamebreaker and try for a level 2, and that's quite a sight. Pulling off a level 2 gamebreaker in NBA Street vol. 2 is pure nirvana, I've seen guys do bounce passes off the backboard to one guy, who alley-oops mid-air to the player on the outside. No kidding, my friend and I witnessed it for the first time and both put our pads down and applauded. That doesn't happen every day, I can tell you.

I like the pick and roll,
I like the give and go.

Essentially, there are two main game modes. NBA Challenge is a predictable slog through all the NBA teams all over the US, region by region. After each region is creamed, you'll face an all-star team from that region and then progress to the next. This mode allows you to unlock stuff like all-star players, vintage jerseys, that kind of thing. It's good, but it's not the heart of the game.



Be a Legend, however, is the real deal. The idea is simple; create a baller, form a team, play a few games and get better as you go along. The monkeys you get to pick from to join you at the beginning are understandably crap, especially if you've been playing with NBA stars in Challenge mode, but it's okay since you yourself are fairly pants too. Each win, however, gifts you with experience points and you get the chance to boost your stats between matches. The more style conscious of you out there can choose to buy new tricks and dunks instead, to make your game a bit more fly; whatever floats your boat. Wins also boost your reputation and the more rep you have the more pick-up games and tournaments you unlock. Winning also allows you to snag the best player off the loosing team to join your own, which is a sweet addition since it means you're always fielding the best team available in any situation. The tournaments themselves always end with you facing off against a street legend and their team which are the NBA street equivalent of boss characters. These guys provide a bit more of a challenge, but if you beat them they happily join you too. This feature makes the game and turns it into a kind of sports game RPG hybrid. I myself beat Stretch Monroe (who some of you will remember from the first game) quite early and me and him together were unstoppable! We were joined later by a huge lumbering Chinese guy named Mei-Ying, who looked a lot like that guy who plays for the Lakers and is in the ibook advert with the dwarf from Austin Powers. With these guys my line up was tight, until I beat the Lakers in an off court challenge that is, at which point I had to let Mei-Ying go in favour of Shaquille O'Neal. It was no contest really.

'cause it's basketball,
I'm Mr. Kurtis Blow.

At the end of the day, it's hard not to love NBA street vol. 2. It's all so beautiful; I was hooked from the very beginning. The sole reason I can't give it the maximum recommendation is that, while the one-player game is sublime, the multi-player version is just adequate. It boils down to this; you can play four players, but on only a maximum of two a side. No three guys versus the computer in all night male bonding tournaments, oh no. This might seem picky, but it does grate having to pass the ball to the computer when you've got plenty mates around who could and should be playing that position. Also, the Be a Legend mode is strictly one player, which sucks. How hard would it have been to expand the playability to allow two, or even three players to grow together, eh? It's a shame. On an off note, though, when you first get the game I recommend you create all you friends as ballers and enter them into Be a Legend mode, and then start playing as yourself. I did this and I found they kept popping up on the New York courts playing for other teams. It was a weird fluke, especially entertaining since it set up my huge 6' 5" hulking mate in there with skin tight 70s gear and he seemed to get picked constantly, much to his dismay.

Anyway anyway, enough blabbing. There's so much to do, so many things to unlock, so many moves to bust, this is undoubtedly the best basketball game I have ever played and when you play it you'll feel the same. It's just got it; when you turn the machine on you grin, when you turn it off you grimace. It's got that tingle at the back of the neck thing going on, you just can't escape it. And as you get better, the games get even sweeter and the smiles even wider; it don't get much better.



Me, I'm heading back to it now, I'm only a few wins from unlocking Larry Bird.

They're playing basketball.
We love that basketball.

'Basketball' was bought to you by Kurtis Blow, who we've all experienced recently with 'The Breaks' on the GTA:Vice City soundtrack, although his greatest hits are out next month. Why not have a listen by clicking here...

Thunderbolt score: nine out of ten

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