Genre: Sports
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: EA Big
Release Date: February 8, 2005
Buy 'NBA STREET V3': Xbox | GameCube | PlayStation 2
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Your very own And1 Mix Tape
NBA Street graced the PS2 the summer after my junior year in college and for many nights that summer my friends and I (yeah, I really did have college friends) wrecked each other with gamebreaker after gamebreaker that brought us back to childhood memories of NBA Jam in coin-op arcades. Man, that was like, back when the Knicks were good… Anyhow, EA Big has brought us the third iteration of NBA Street and continues to refine what has proven to be its alternative sports flagship franchise. V3 is perhaps a more evolutionary step than a revolutionary step and if NBA Street is your thing, then perhaps you’d be very satisfied. Me? Well, let me explain…
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I’m not a student of basketball as I am with hockey, football and soccer. Therefore, my interest in realistic basketball games is limited. When NBA Street came out I went ballistic. This was my type of basketball game. The over the top, out your ass, what the hell was that gameplay was keeping me up at night. I skipped over NBA Street V2 and so missed what many hailed as an improvement in the franchise so my frame of reference is NBA Street.
Let me begin by telling you what V3 does well. V3 looks great. The artistic direction is way beyond what you normally see in other sports games. V3 rivals SSX in terms of its style and aesthetic design. Game models look as if they’ve been ripped right out of comic books with appropriately exaggerated features and outfits. The animations are very smooth, especially on X-Box, and the ambience of the various courts is rife with awesome texture work of graffiti, lighting and off-court animations.
V3’s chief strength is the depth of its customizability. You can flesh out a baler that can very well look exactly like you or whatever you choose to create. There are various templates to use but you can start everything from scratch. From there you go on to pick a few teammates and begin designing your home court which can take place day or night and as you accrue street credit and money you can buy new gear for your player and new tidbits to dress up your court. Over all I was pretty impressed by the amount of personality you can inject into your court. I imagine that you could make a court unlike any other out there with all the options you can slap together.
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Multiplayer is rather fun on X-Box Live. My favorite aspect of NBA Street was playing my friends and while online play is a great extender for V3, it still can’t compare to having your buddies next to you while you play. To be fair I think the same could be same for any game. Even so, online tournaments and trash talking never gets dull however getting started can be frustrating as you’ll run into a lot of players who know the game inside and out.
The single player game is set up to resemble a narrative of a low rent baler trying to get noticed by the NBA. You have 90 days to compete in local tournaments and set piece matches. Most of the matches will set some parameters such as “first to 21, dunks only” or “first to gamebreaker” and the like. All in all it’s an attempt to keep the game from getting old as you will begin to master the AI. You also earn money and street credit points to further customize your court and you crew which is nice but really its only window dressing as there isn’t much practical value to the assets you can buy. Things don’t get good until you begin to build up your reputation and start to accrue rivals. EA Big went to great lengths to make sure V3 doesn’t get too old too quick. Various NBA stars will show up and play with you or challenge you to games.
Another area where EA Big wants to evolve is the trick stick. The trick stick is your right analog stick which will allow you to pull off some moves and show off your handle depending on which turbo button you have pressed. This doesn’t translate as well to the X-Box controller from the Dual Shock since the Dual Shock grants you four turbo buttons and the X-Box controller only has to and the analog triggers’ long pull is troublesome when it comes to timing your moves. Even after learning the deceptively simple controls, I still had a difficult time pulling off certain moves even though I knew what I was doing because I had difficulty timing things.
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What’s nice about V3’s controls is that while the gameplay mechanics are simple at first, you can blend things into a pretty chain of combinations that are obviously inspired by the And1 Mixtapes with the likes Half Man Half Amazing, Hotsauce and The Professor (to name a few). If you can get the timing down and use your imagination, you can link together some pretty cool stuff. Stack enough style points and you unleash a Gamebreaker where you can link together these same moves but in a Technicolor display of hallucinogenic madness that would trip out Bob Weir and Phil Lesh.
Call me crazy, but I like things simple. I prefer NBA Street over V3 despite the unlockable stuff and refined gameplay elements in V3. The camera angles were wonky for my tastes and the in-game announcer came close to ruining the whole game for me and my issue with the gameplay timing is perhaps my own. What I cannot deny is that V3 is the technical masterpiece of the lot. The game’s depth defies what you’d expect from a pseudo-sports game. NBA Street is EA Big’s flagship even in the face of SSX due wider audience and market share. More people dig basketball than snowboarding and NBA Street dwells on the individual art and expression that a street baller showcases. I imagine the only place you could find a finer display of skills would be on a summer day in Harlem’s Rucker Park. While I personally didn’t find much satisfaction in V3, I appreciate its technical merits and visual style which would make it a fan favorite among most gamers.
Score: 8.5/10
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