NBA '06
We take a closer look at Sony’s PSP roundball offering.
Published: September 12, 2005
When the PSP debuted just a few months ago, Sony was expectedly there, delivering a slew of entries and continuations of their existing brands. Some of them, like the universal must-have WipEout Pure, received critical and commercial success, and others... well, let’s just say being a launch title is good for sales, no matter what the reviews say.
Still, it’s not like Sony isn’t trying. In fact, after heading down to San Diego earlier this year and checking in on what they were up to, we walked about genuinely surprised about the turnaround the company was making some of the projects, like the puzzling Road to Sunday were a bit more out there than others, but unquestionably, the most promising had to be NBA ‘06.
Sure, it had a high-falutin’ concept about creating a player and then experiencing the classic struggle of team vs. fame that everyone seems to be getting into these days, but it was the core, the fundamentals of the action that felt so good. Hell, we weren’t even allowed to play a proper game, but just shooting in the minigame they provided felt solid – made all the better by a great visual feedback tool.
We preface our impressions of the PSP version of NBA ‘06 with that for this reason: from what we can tell, it doesn’t have either of those core bits. We’re certainly not knocking the game for it, since a UMD is less than a quarter of the capacity of even a single layer DVD, but we do want to put it out there before moving forward, mainly because that was got us so geeked on NBA ‘06 to begin with.
The pint-sized version of the game (or at least the build we got) offered the standard bits you’d expect from a basketball game; all the players and teams, the standard exhibition, season and playoff modes, and for quick games, an all-star event. It also offers ladder games, where you can pick a team and then take them up the rungs to tackle the other teams in the league. For practice, you’ll get the obvious free-throw and shoot around options.
Should you need a break from the usual game modes, there’s a handful of mini-games, including the same Own the Court mode that was so entertaining in the PS2 version of the game (albeit tweaked for the better to show more of a section of the court captured by the player so you don’t have to run all that way over to a shot to see if it’s been taken). There’s also an obstacle course-style run through a basic training drills, a 3 point contest, a game of HORSE, and the all-important-but-completely-unrelated game of Dodgeball (which had an impressively complex set of buttons to learn).
The game also captures any key moments in the game (or at least pre-set key moments) and saves them in snapshot form as a trading card to move between friends. Everything from dunks to steals to passes is recorded if you pull things off well enough, which means it’d probably take months to collect them all – hence the trading aspect.
Regardless of the end result of Sony’s launch offerings, they did feature something no 3rd party games offered: online play. NBA ‘06 keeps this going with both Ad-Hoc (local) and Infrastructure (online) matches, though we couldn’t get the online matches to work (likely because we were using a Japanese PSP at the time).
Once we’d dropped into the game, a couple of key things became obvious. First of all, the game’s absolutely silky framerate was awesome; 60 fps was locked in nearly all the time (or at least looked like it) save for when overlays rolled in, but that’s likely a minor tweak that wasn’t implemented yet. It’s also remarkably similar looks-wise to the last PSP outing, which either says a lot for the engine and programming team’s prowess with the PSP or a lack of advancement (we don’t mind going with the former).
The game is absolutely a simulation, so our attempts to steal like a madman NBA Street-stye proved, since we were called for a foul 99% of the time. The aforementioned lack of the PS2 versions clockwise spinning shot meter made hitting the shots hard from player to player, and the improved physics and graphical approach to tackling key shots like an off-hand fingertip roll or a spinning fadeaway jumper meant shots didn’t fall when they felt like they should have. Other things showed that Sony’s melding of arcade moves with sim regulations felt a little stiff at times.
Though the animation is noticeably improved (no doubt a nod to the improvements the dev team made with the PS2 version of the franchise), you still can’t easily cut left then right or change direction intuitively without being called for traveling. It’s realistic, we suppose, but most of the players on the medium/med-high end of the stats range will never, ever be able to break any ankles, though this is probably intentional.
The audio too is a little mixed, but this is probably because things aren’t quite prioritized yet on the UMD. The running commentary is lively, and makes observations constantly, but the notes can be as much as a second or two late – well after the move was made and the ball has changed hands. Things like crowd noise and introduction speeches are also a bit choppy, but this is almost certainly because of the build we had.
While the game is still early (very early; the soundtrack consisted of all of three or four hip-hop tracks and the game frequently locked up when we did something it didn’t like), what’s there is promising. The shooting mechanic absolutely needs to be lifted from the PS2 version of the game to make shots feel right (or at least give you an idea of when they’re way, way wrong), and we’d like to check in on things in a few weeks to see how they’ve shaped up, but if the many random minor problems can come together at the last second (which they often do), this could be an absolutely killer basketball game. We’ll keep you posted.
Still, it’s not like Sony isn’t trying. In fact, after heading down to San Diego earlier this year and checking in on what they were up to, we walked about genuinely surprised about the turnaround the company was making some of the projects, like the puzzling Road to Sunday were a bit more out there than others, but unquestionably, the most promising had to be NBA ‘06.
Sure, it had a high-falutin’ concept about creating a player and then experiencing the classic struggle of team vs. fame that everyone seems to be getting into these days, but it was the core, the fundamentals of the action that felt so good. Hell, we weren’t even allowed to play a proper game, but just shooting in the minigame they provided felt solid – made all the better by a great visual feedback tool.
We preface our impressions of the PSP version of NBA ‘06 with that for this reason: from what we can tell, it doesn’t have either of those core bits. We’re certainly not knocking the game for it, since a UMD is less than a quarter of the capacity of even a single layer DVD, but we do want to put it out there before moving forward, mainly because that was got us so geeked on NBA ‘06 to begin with.
The pint-sized version of the game (or at least the build we got) offered the standard bits you’d expect from a basketball game; all the players and teams, the standard exhibition, season and playoff modes, and for quick games, an all-star event. It also offers ladder games, where you can pick a team and then take them up the rungs to tackle the other teams in the league. For practice, you’ll get the obvious free-throw and shoot around options.
Should you need a break from the usual game modes, there’s a handful of mini-games, including the same Own the Court mode that was so entertaining in the PS2 version of the game (albeit tweaked for the better to show more of a section of the court captured by the player so you don’t have to run all that way over to a shot to see if it’s been taken). There’s also an obstacle course-style run through a basic training drills, a 3 point contest, a game of HORSE, and the all-important-but-completely-unrelated game of Dodgeball (which had an impressively complex set of buttons to learn).
The game also captures any key moments in the game (or at least pre-set key moments) and saves them in snapshot form as a trading card to move between friends. Everything from dunks to steals to passes is recorded if you pull things off well enough, which means it’d probably take months to collect them all – hence the trading aspect.
Regardless of the end result of Sony’s launch offerings, they did feature something no 3rd party games offered: online play. NBA ‘06 keeps this going with both Ad-Hoc (local) and Infrastructure (online) matches, though we couldn’t get the online matches to work (likely because we were using a Japanese PSP at the time).
Once we’d dropped into the game, a couple of key things became obvious. First of all, the game’s absolutely silky framerate was awesome; 60 fps was locked in nearly all the time (or at least looked like it) save for when overlays rolled in, but that’s likely a minor tweak that wasn’t implemented yet. It’s also remarkably similar looks-wise to the last PSP outing, which either says a lot for the engine and programming team’s prowess with the PSP or a lack of advancement (we don’t mind going with the former).
The game is absolutely a simulation, so our attempts to steal like a madman NBA Street-stye proved, since we were called for a foul 99% of the time. The aforementioned lack of the PS2 versions clockwise spinning shot meter made hitting the shots hard from player to player, and the improved physics and graphical approach to tackling key shots like an off-hand fingertip roll or a spinning fadeaway jumper meant shots didn’t fall when they felt like they should have. Other things showed that Sony’s melding of arcade moves with sim regulations felt a little stiff at times.
Though the animation is noticeably improved (no doubt a nod to the improvements the dev team made with the PS2 version of the franchise), you still can’t easily cut left then right or change direction intuitively without being called for traveling. It’s realistic, we suppose, but most of the players on the medium/med-high end of the stats range will never, ever be able to break any ankles, though this is probably intentional.
The audio too is a little mixed, but this is probably because things aren’t quite prioritized yet on the UMD. The running commentary is lively, and makes observations constantly, but the notes can be as much as a second or two late – well after the move was made and the ball has changed hands. Things like crowd noise and introduction speeches are also a bit choppy, but this is almost certainly because of the build we had.
While the game is still early (very early; the soundtrack consisted of all of three or four hip-hop tracks and the game frequently locked up when we did something it didn’t like), what’s there is promising. The shooting mechanic absolutely needs to be lifted from the PS2 version of the game to make shots feel right (or at least give you an idea of when they’re way, way wrong), and we’d like to check in on things in a few weeks to see how they’ve shaped up, but if the many random minor problems can come together at the last second (which they often do), this could be an absolutely killer basketball game. We’ll keep you posted.