NBA 07
Sony's in-house roundball offering is surprisingly solid. Who knew?
Published: November 30, 2006
What you won't get for your 60 clams is the much-vaunted The Life storyline mode from the PS2 version, which is, for better or worse, the bulk of the game's single-player experience. Without it, NBA 07 feels a little stunted, though there was obviously an attempt to offset this with one of the coolest features I've ever seen in a sports game: the NBA Replay. Split into two separate (and not yet equal) parts, the goal of each is the same: replication of key moments from actual NBA games. The bulk of your time with them will probably be the 25 weeks of last season, where you're tasked with essentially reproducing history.
This is all well and good, but Sony is committed to introducing a handful of new downloadable challenges every week for this season. In both last year's events and this one, you're given the opportunity to go The Extra Mile and pull of much harder goals like not turning over the ball with a particular character, notching a certain number of specific shots, hitting things from certain parts of the court and keeping the other team under a given number of points. These simple little challenges are easily the strongest part of NBA 07's offering, and I can't emphasize enough how smart it was of Sony to use the data like they did.
I touched on it a little already, but it bears repeating: this is an extremely solid game, visually. There was an obvious bump up in detail on all the characters, and while I still have some serious issues with the modeling of player faces as a whole, at least it's consistent as opposed to NBA 2K7 very obvious stars. Sony implemented some light shaders to the game, giving the players a little sweat, but this really just makes them look plastic and, well, scary. Shiny is nice, but if you're going to go the sweat route, it needs to be as detailed (and really, it's a lighting thing too) as something like NBA 2K7 or Fight Night.
Luckily, the rest of the detail is all there; fantastic animations, that, while still canned, do a great job of transitioning between motion-captured bits while still retaining the sense of intertia that players have driving towards the hole. Cloth physics are on just about everything you can imagine would have it, and it's a little more subtle than some of the other basketball games have done. I personally think this works to the game's benefit, but regardless, it's still surprising to see Sony pulling off this level of technical advancement this early into the PS3's life.
The same goes for the sound design, which is, quite frankly, fantastic from an atmosphere. More than any other sports game at launch. NBA 07 absolutely rocks the room-filling kind of surround sound that a PlayStation system is now finally capable. It's not just shoving stuff to the back channel, you'll get some fantastic reverb (that I could swar was different in various arenas), as well as tons of rich, thick crowd noise. There's not quite enough on-court chatter as I would have liked, and the commentary is about as tame as it gets, but it's still great stuff overall.
And really, that's something I didn't think I was going to say about Sony's sports launch effort. I fully expected NBA 07 to be, well, crap. That's probably not fair, as they've demonstrated with the PSP version that they can make a basketball game without a gimmicky storyline still work, but I really wasn't expecting this level of technical sophistication. If this is the sort of thing that's going to come out of Sony consolidating their worldwide development studios, we're in for some seriously kick-ass looking games -- and sooner than most probably think.
