NBA ShootOut 2004

First, the goodness. The NBA Shootout Career mode approaches life differently than the other games. Here, you get the chance to create a player, play with him during summer leagues, and go for the big contract to play in the big show or go back to the minors for more skill development. Unfortunately, the “offers” I saw didn’t go into dollar amounts, etc, amounting mostly to a pass/fail type approach to making the team. Show me the money!

Another major innovation that just might make the leaders sit up and take notice is voice recognition. Having the ability to call for a pass, set a defense, send cutters, etc by yelling it out rather than pressing a series of buttons, really adds to the immersive aspects of the game. Online voice chat (meaning trash talking) also give you that “almost sweaty” feel to the game that means you are having fun while schooling the pretenders.

A neat feature is the automatic slo-mo action shots of your most spectacular dunks and blocks. You know you nailed it and your opponent can only sit back and groan as King James crashes the lanes and throws down a monster jam in full slo-mo glory. This is a fun game to play with kids, because they can pick up the controls easily and be dunking with the best in no time.

Finally, the “create-a-dunk” feature allows the player to customize one of 12 dunks to fit their specific style. This created the single funniest episode of my gameplay here, by hitting a dunk where, at the end of the dunk, my feet and body were 12 feet up in the air and parallel to the floor. We ran that through instant replay several times just to get all the laughs. Unfortunately, the “create-a-dunk” portion of the dunk was compressed into about 0.1 seconds of the dunk time, so without slo-mo instant replay, you would miss it.

The flaws in this game are mostly related to graphics and player AI. There were a fair amount of collision detection issues, with players hands passing through other bodies, dunkers going right through the backboard, etc. The referee models were highly realistic, in that they seemed to be sleepwalking half of the time. It was kind of funny to see a ref kicking a ball ALL THE WAY down the court just trying to pick it up and never quite able to. Players away from the ball often seemed to stand around and not be very active. Another big problem with the AI is what happens when you do knock a ball loose from a player. No one dives for the ball, not even the player you stole it from. It takes at least a second or two for anyone to react.

Passing the rock is pretty simple, just keep pressing X until a guy is open and then take the shot. The shot control is pretty tight, with some nice action and options for adjusting your shot on the fly and passing out of a jump shot. I never could get the mini-plays feature to work very well, but you can send cutters or call for a pick, etc.

All in all, 989’s effort is interesting, giving us a 3rd option on playing NBA basketball on the PS2 but I’m afraid that it still lags significantly behind the leaders. The voice recognition is cool, but probably not enough to make it worthwhile to pick up over the Sega and EA offerings.