Three Flavors of Roundball
Sony's newest basketball sim mixes in platform-specific goodies to produce three games that should probably have been just one.
Published: October 5, 2007
It's the PlayStation Portable version that offers the least accurate version of a basketball sim, and as weird as it sound to say this, it's probably the best version of the three. It's not that the PSP game is any more broken than the PS2 one (in fact, it's actually better as a straight basketball game), but with all of the portable-friendly mini-games, it really does make for one of the best sports experiences you can get on the system. It's just that, well, it's not a straight basketball experience.
As a matter of fact, the mini-games are the focus here -- so much so that there's an entire mode and menu option dedicated to them that let you play variants on Whack-a-Mole, skeeball, pinball, Breakout, dodgeball and HORSE. Also returning are Own the Court (which is also in the PS3 version), which is easily one of the most addictive little time wasters that Sony has ever come up with for a sports game. Best of all, most of the games can be played online, and the matchmaking is really quite solid. You can play straight games of basketball too, but again, straight basketball isn't really any of the NBA games' strength.
Instead, it's Elimination and Conquest Modes, the street ball variations on regular baskeball, that are the real long-term single- and multi-player draws here. Elimination gives each man on a team specific team-oriented abilities, and once they've banked enough points, they drop out, activating and gifting the rest of the team with those powers. It's a cool concept, and if done with proper combos, a two-man team can be far more devastating than a full complement of players. Conquest returns from last year, tweaked to be faster (and like most modes in the game, is now online) and a little easier with things like defending teams being able to steal a player from an attacking team if they fight them off, but for the most part the same addictive process of capturing other teams and creating new uberteams from their rosters is just as good as it was last year.
Again, all three games offer a different take on what is at its core a fairly basic game of basketball. The PS2 version is probably the least interesting simply because the shoddy framerate and weird bugs that have players passing out of bounds or wiggy AI counters any of The Life's story-driven impact. The PSP version is ultimately the best of all of them because it contains the least amount of actual, straight basketball, but at least the PS3 version's sim aspects are solid enough to handle plenty of repeat plays and all the additional free downloadable content.
Ultimately, it would be best for Sony to probably ditch the PS2 version and concentrate on making the actual basketball game solid for the PSP and PS3 versions next year. Incorporate all of that motion capture and acting from The Life into a proper next-gen showpiece, upgrade the engine to allow for better lighting and maybe some o' them fancy sweat shaders the competition likes so much and the game will at least look as solid as the other basketball games out there. The PSP version's mini-games and Conquest Mode are fantastic in their own right, and really do fit the platform, but again, improving the physics and general flow of the game wouldn't hurt things either.
In the end, NBA 08 offers enough outside stuff to distract from the fact that the core game of basketball is seriously lacking when compared to the other games on the market -- it's simply a matter of how much distraction there actually is. The PSP one obviously leads in this respect, but with the things Sony has attempted with the PS2 and PS3 versions, all the ingredients for a really unique basketball sim are in place, Sony just needs to pull the trigger. As the games stand right now, though, they're merely half-cocked.
