NBA '07
Sony's pint-sized b-ball offering is fun, but hardly flawless.
Published: September 25, 2006
It was Conquest Mode that snared me the most. Essentially set up as a turn-based version of roundball Risk, you pick a regular NBA team and the go about either challenging another team or defending against one of their challenges. If you lose the challenge, the winning team can steal away one of your players, and vice-versa if you're on the defending side. At the end of every round, you can shuffle your players around to best defend or attack, but you also run the risk of losing them if you can't put up the points to win a game.
Played a little more like streetball with arcade elements Conquest matches boast little touches like busting threes or blocking shots causing the defender or shooter to get "dizzy" and play more poorly until their team scores again, or if you're falling behind, a big point circle appears beyond the three point arc. SCEA Sports added in RPG-ish elements to things to help reward you for keeping certain players for long stretches or building up a team. At the end of every game, medals are awarded for scorers and team players, and three medals equals a star, which extend's that city's team's "life" bar, forcing competitors to score more points to win a match-up. Should you manage to capture all the teams in a particular region, you'll unlock an NBA Legend, who are maxed-out, stats-wise and can never be stolen, but will disappear if your stranglehold on a region is lost.
I know I'm spending a lot of time on one particular game mode, but it's actually one of the coolest mergers of a light turn-based strategy game and a basketball sim that I've ever seen, and just sort of defines the kind of game that NBA 07 on the PSP is; light, short, simple bits of gameplay that have solid hooks -- though they certainly aren't perfect.
For starters, I'm still craving that that circular shooting gauge that debuted in NBA '06. It made it plain to see how a player's stats would affect their shooting abilities, but it was almost like a mini-game with every shot. Small complaint, I know, but still. A bigger one might be that the game was supposedly finished, but once I ran into a bug during an exhibition game where the quarter was supposed to end with an instant replay, but the clock hung at .5 seconds and once I accidentally threw away the ball, I couldn't pick it up again. Players at the opposite end of the court wigged out or were otherwise frozen. The only way to fix it was to quit out of the Exhibition game and start over. Had it been a Season game, I would have been fairly pissed.
As mentioned before, though, things visually are damned impressive. The games are lightning quick, there's a nice sense of weight and momentum, the courts are nicely modeled, players sport a nice sheen, good muscle detail, and it all runs at a buttery smooth clip. It hasn't quite gotten to the point where the characters can be recognized by face (and it's doubtful it ever will on the PSP), but a combination of modest-poly characters and some great texture work add up to a purdy game indeed.
The audio is a little more mixed. Usually there's little to accompany things beyond an ambient track if you're outside, the slap of the ball, squeak of shoes and the sound of shots caroming off the backboard. There is a bit of light running commentary, which makes general observations, but it seems either the limitations of the PSP hardware or the speed of the game can't quite keep up, and there are times when comments are made well after the events have taken place. Luckily, the crowd reactions seems fairly dead-on, and with headphones, it actually builds a nice sense of ambience.
In the end, NBA 07 manages to carve out a solid niche with mini-game-based extras, and a graphics engine that's surprisingly solid. The AI can be wonky at times (teammates can occasionally have brain farts and miss obvious blocking attempts), but overall, things are actually fairly deep. So long as you go into things understanding that this isn't really a console-level basketball experience and that it's uniquely designed for shorter, more portable games, you end up with a shockingly good basketball entry. If they end up adding in some of the fluff from the console versions next year, it's going to make things near irresistible.
