EA for PS2

Street Hoops

1-2 Players

The natural continuation of the NBA Jam franchise on next generation hardware.

NBA Street is a three-on-three street basketball game featuring actual NBA player as well as a slew of original street ballers to choose from. Games are played to a score of 21, with the standard win by 2 rule in place. Each character is rated in several different skill areas, like blocking, dunking, 3-point shots, stealing, etc. Unlike some games where skill levels don’t amount to much difference between players, in NBA Street, you’ll know the who the guy with maxxed out blocking is – he’s the only one on the court who can leap 5 feet straight up and grab a ball out of midair before it reached the basket. Likewise, characters with little skill in certain areas show it – unless a guy has good handling skills, he’ll be tripping over his own feet and fumbling the ball if you try to pull any of the advanced trick maneuvers. This is a great balancing factor to the game, since choosing your squad requires you to really think about which attributes are going to be important to you. Take a team with no long range skills onto the court and you’ll be at a serious scoring disadvantage if the other guys have a mad bomber who can nail the 3-point shots reliably.

The game adds in a combo feature that allows you to link together moves like dodges, pump-fakes, and shots to score points. The more points you score the faster you fill up your Gamebreaker meter. When its full, you get a limited time to take a Gamebreaker shot. This is an "can’t miss unless its blocked" shot that’s worth the normal number of points for the shot, but it also subtracts that number from the opposing team’s score. Needless to say, Gamebreakers factor into the outcome of many a heated game, and the meter is sufficiently hard to fill so that you’ll only see one or two of these shots per game.

The gameplay! If someone told me before I played NBA Street that a sports game with a combo-based system could work and be fun, I’d be mighty skeptical. Not only is it fun, it’s downright genius – the GameBreaker meter adds new levels of strategy. The stereotype-busting street players are great, too. Wait until you see the 7’ tall Japanese blocking monster! Okay, so there IS a Rastafarian dude who pretty much conforms to the stereotypes, but all of the original characters are cool, and much more fun than any of the NBA people. The announcer is actually pretty good, too. Nice voice work on all of the characters, including what sounds like some actual Michael Jordan quips.

Only two players are supported for multiplayer. What about my multi-tap? Ah well, there’s always NBA 2K2 for four player madness, I guess. No options for one-on-one or two-on-two. Whenever you steal the ball, the chances of the AI players stealing it back right away improve drastically… artificial challenge balance, bleargh!

So far, I like Biggs (the monster blocker), Bonafide (the mad handling and dunking machine) and Drake (the 3-point hitter). I’ve got Biggs to cover the net on defense and snag the ball out of the air, Bonafide to run up the GameBreaker meter by racking up mad combos, and Drake to nail the money shots from outside the 3-point line.

Graphics – 8 (animation is good, the courts look great, but players lack some detail)

Sound – 8 (Hip hop music soundtrack is good, voices are very good)

Replay – 9 (There are lots of hidden characters and items to unlock and playing through the game is fun)

Overall: 8.5