NBA '06
989's take on basketball goes where no sports game has gone before, and just may be the triumphant return of Sony's first-party sports department. Yes, really.
Published: April 25, 2005
By now, there's really no need to point out what kind of track record 989 has taken since the transition from the 32-bit days. The PSX-to-PS2 switch didn't go especially well, and critically and financially, Sony's 989 Sports off shoot has suffered. Here's the thing, though: whereas an uberpublisher like EA is still stuck making sure shareholders are happy, Sony does still have the ability to take a year or two off and revamp things.
Not surprisingly, that's exactly what they did, taking a year off and going back to the drawing board after lackluster sales and a quickly dwindling fan base was driven towards greener 3rd-party pastures. It's rare that we take a look at any work in progress and instantly forget past mistakes, but the time 989 has spent with what are now the ashes of NBA ShootOut will absolutely make you forget there was a series of crappy, unplayable basketball titles being pumped out of San Diego.
Exactly what will wash the stank out of your mouth comes in the form of a two-fold kick in the pants to the series. The first is a simple but intuitive shooting mechanic that's the same whether driving into the paint or shooting free-throws; simply holding the shoot (circle) button will fill a circular meter that rises quickly in a clockwise arc, going from red to yellow to green -- and then quickly to red if you overshoot the sweet spot.
Nailing a long-range shot simply requires that you hold the button for the right amount of time, just like any other basketball game, but the visual feedback is what sells the feeling of a solid shot. Complementing the new shooting controls is a massive overhaul in the motion capture data and animations that adjust for things like momentum, shooting angle and what hand the ball leaves. All of these factors play a part in how open or wide the sweet spot is when charging up the meter, so the speed, position and angle of the shot factors in almost as much as the kind of coverage a shooter is faced with.
The second area of improvement is easily the most ambitious and ground-breaking in 989's history. In an attempt to capture the entire scope of a basketball superstar's on- and off-court life, the game will place you in the shoes of a created player and take you from wanna-be to getting an agent, getting drafted, working you way into the regular lineup and then, most important of all, balancing your agent's whining about not showing off and playing towards the crowd to get you more endorsement deals and your coach's drubbing over not working with fellow players to improve the team as a whole.
This isn't just a gussied up career mode, though. 989 brought in a team of Hollywood writers to sculpt an entire storyline that carries your character through the whole experience, creating rivalries, developing crunch time situations that will determine the outcome of specific career events and basically just giving a beginning, middle, climax and end to a sports game where before there never was one.
To ensure that the game doesn't just play like a serious of identical full-length career games (though 989 was quick to point out over and over and over again that this was a basketball sim), things are mixed up with pre-created situations like, say, having two minutes to come back from a deficit or having to score points in a specific way. This effectively gives the game "missions" that will need to be passed to move the story forward.
Not surprisingly, that's exactly what they did, taking a year off and going back to the drawing board after lackluster sales and a quickly dwindling fan base was driven towards greener 3rd-party pastures. It's rare that we take a look at any work in progress and instantly forget past mistakes, but the time 989 has spent with what are now the ashes of NBA ShootOut will absolutely make you forget there was a series of crappy, unplayable basketball titles being pumped out of San Diego.
Exactly what will wash the stank out of your mouth comes in the form of a two-fold kick in the pants to the series. The first is a simple but intuitive shooting mechanic that's the same whether driving into the paint or shooting free-throws; simply holding the shoot (circle) button will fill a circular meter that rises quickly in a clockwise arc, going from red to yellow to green -- and then quickly to red if you overshoot the sweet spot.
Nailing a long-range shot simply requires that you hold the button for the right amount of time, just like any other basketball game, but the visual feedback is what sells the feeling of a solid shot. Complementing the new shooting controls is a massive overhaul in the motion capture data and animations that adjust for things like momentum, shooting angle and what hand the ball leaves. All of these factors play a part in how open or wide the sweet spot is when charging up the meter, so the speed, position and angle of the shot factors in almost as much as the kind of coverage a shooter is faced with.
The second area of improvement is easily the most ambitious and ground-breaking in 989's history. In an attempt to capture the entire scope of a basketball superstar's on- and off-court life, the game will place you in the shoes of a created player and take you from wanna-be to getting an agent, getting drafted, working you way into the regular lineup and then, most important of all, balancing your agent's whining about not showing off and playing towards the crowd to get you more endorsement deals and your coach's drubbing over not working with fellow players to improve the team as a whole.
This isn't just a gussied up career mode, though. 989 brought in a team of Hollywood writers to sculpt an entire storyline that carries your character through the whole experience, creating rivalries, developing crunch time situations that will determine the outcome of specific career events and basically just giving a beginning, middle, climax and end to a sports game where before there never was one.
To ensure that the game doesn't just play like a serious of identical full-length career games (though 989 was quick to point out over and over and over again that this was a basketball sim), things are mixed up with pre-created situations like, say, having two minutes to come back from a deficit or having to score points in a specific way. This effectively gives the game "missions" that will need to be passed to move the story forward.
