NBA 2K7
Best basketball sim out there? Yep, that sounds about right.
Published: November 30, 2006
The game's newest feature -- and really the only one that properly takes advantage of the PS3's SIXAXIS controller -- is the free-throw mechanic. You essentially grip the controller in the center, and then pitch back over your head then push forward with a little roll. It basically feels like you're really shooting the shot once you get it down, but you still feel like a tool doing it until you really figure the whole mechanic out, and that'll take a while given that nearly every player has different shot timings. I didn't even know until about halfway through my time with the game that you could turn back on the old right analog stick shooting method until I stumbled onto it while bravely navigating the game's crap menus. Whoops. Once you get it down, the shots do feel a little more natural than just flicking a stick, but only barely.
Throughout the core game's basketball roots, though, there's a level of presentation here that's quickly approaching broadcast level events. It's not all there, mainly due to the odd clipping error (though that has been improved nicely over last year, along with far, far better cloth physics on the uniforms), and there are still the incredibly annoying invisible walls that block progress while still allowing animations to play out, but these are starting to fade into what is a far more impressive display of momentum and power.
Drop-stepping into the paint has actual oomph now, and watching players' hands actually track with the ball, their heads making moves to look (or even head fake) where they're going and just the combination of solid physics and inertia actually being translated fairly well is fantastic stuff. Unfortunately, if you want to run the game in "true HD", the 1080p overhead on all those physics will cost you in the framerate department. Otherwise, the game runs at a fairly respectable (if not entirely smooth) framerate.
There are some issues with the player models too. Some of them are indeed at the point where you can recognize them just by face, but those are the star players, and all the other minor players are nowhere near as detailed. It's understandable given how much time probably went into modeling them, but the gulp of detail between the two types is a little frightening. Seeing sweat roll down a player's skin, however, is not. It's awesome, and if next-gen has proven one thing, it's that sports games can do really good sweat. Okay, on second thought that is a little scary.
The audio is a little more solid, though that's only because it's so minimal to begin with. The crowd generally isn't too into things, and the commentary from Kenny Smith and Kevin Harlan gets repetitious after, well, a single freakin' game for some comments. It's not that bad, though hearing the same pre-game commentary is annoying. Luckily the chatter from the players is what takes the fore here, and it's done quite well. Calling for picks, shouting out the situation, calling plays (on-the-fly formations and plays can be done with a press of the d-pad directions) and the like are all quite nicely done.
Oddly enough the soundtrack is mostly flicked off, perhaps because Visual Concepts wanted to allow some songs to crop up as you played more of the game (or at least you'd have the option), and to be honest, I'm not that much of a hip-hop fan to begin with, so I didn't mind, but turning the songs on means delving into the sea of menus that 2K cooked up, and that's just painful.
Luckily, few other parts of NBA 2K7 are painful. The street ball section may be a little more half-baked than the rest of the game, but extensive career options, great online play, and a downright solid game of basketball help VC and 2K Sports deliver the best roundball sim on the PS3.
