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ESPN NBA Basketball

Sega Sports and EA Sports have been battling it out for sports dominance since the days of the Sega Genesis. While EA Sports has dominated much of the intervening period, Sega became far more competitive after exiting hardware to focus on software titles.

On the football end of things, Madden is nearly untouchable but the struggle for NBA dominance has been far more competitive. Since the Dreamcast debut, Sega has actually been leading NBA Live among the hearts of many gamers. Last year, slight sluggishness in gameplay and less graphic polish gave NBA Live the edge but this year, Sega’s revamped franchise, now called ESPN NBA Basketball, is back on top.

One thing helping the game is that the ESPN license is now fully integrated into the title. Following ESPN NFL Football’s example, real ESPN personalities provide all the voicework, giving the title a feel of authenticity. Many of the familiar ESPN graphic overlays and cuts find their way into the title. The branding, unlike last year, is finally more thorough than simply slapping the ESPN logo on the box.

Yet that alone would not be enough to overcome NBA Live; the key to victory is an all-new mode that is unlike anything this reviewer recalls seeing in an NBA title. In what essentially becomes a “basketball RPG,” the 24/7 mode allows you to create your own basketball player and build his stats through drills, one-on-one faceoffs and even “boss battles” where you go up against all-time great NBA players and try to beat them to 21. While this is, at its core, the “street mode” from last year’s title, it’s completely reinvented. You build up state for offense (dunks, mid-range shots and three-pointers) and defense (blocks, steals, defensive awareness) by – and here’s the key – practicing a little each day.

You see, the game keeps track of when the last time you played in 24/7 mode was; the longer the gap, the more your created player’s skills that you spent so much time building up, erode through lack of practice. Skip one day and you probably won’t be penalized. Skip 2-3 days and one or two stats may lose a point or so. Skip a week, you lose more. Go much beyond that and you’ll basically see your player’s skills erode so much, you need to start from scratch.

One key to success in 24/7 mode, other than daily practice, is to begin by working on your defensive skills. If you can win some practice games that build up your stealing and blocking abilities, it’ll become a lot easier to win the games in which you’re working on upping your offensive abilities. One other tip: work on upping your stats for at least a week before taking on one-on-one challengers and defeat a few of those before taking on bosses.

As you may be getting the sense of, 24/7 mode is something unique and new and if you master it, you’ll unlock a lot of goodies along the way to make it worth your while.

What about franchise mode? In football, EA added whole new levels of depth to blow Sega out of the water. Not so in the NBA titles, where Sega still has the edge in detail. While the “point system” in the game isn’t exactly a reflection of real-world NBA revenue limits, it does kind of reflect that owners won’t let you go on an endless spending spree, either. And the NBA salary cap is enforced in the game; sometimes more strictly than in real life.

For example, in the off-season, a team roster must have 12 players on it at all times. This becomes a little weird because even if you have some player you want to release so you can sign a free agent, the game blocks you from doing so. It’s a quirky inaccuracy that really annoys and simply MUST be fixed in next year’s outing. After all, anyone with about a 10-year memory of the NBA can recall when the Lakers cut nearly everyone on their team to sign Orlando Magic free agent Shaquille O’Neal while still staying under the salary cap, then slowly rebuilt the team from the ground up, around O’Neal. You can’t do anything similar to that here and the oversight is the only major flaw in the franchise mode.

As for trades, it’s best to wait for other teams to come with you; while several offers are ones you’ll want to avoid, CPU-offered trades usually come with better terms than anything you can coerce out of the CPU when you propose a trade; some trades offered by the CPU to you bundle a player and a first-round pick, which is nearly impossible to get out of a trade when you propose it.

And the basic gameplay? Well, the pace has been ramped up a bit so that those who felt the game played sluggish won’t have that complaint this time out; controls exist to have a faster-paced or slower-paced game so it’s even adjustable for sim-fans who like a slower game that results in more realistic NBA scores. The only pet peeve here is that the new IsoMotion controls all too often result in making your player vulnerable to a steal rather than opening up a lane to the basket. Even when you juke a player out, too often your player has to “recover” from the juke before going to the basket and the recovery time often is enough that the player you juked has recovered as well, making the whole enterprise kind of pointless.

Happily, the printed game manual in ESPN NBA Basketball is far more complete than the one that shipped with ESPN NFL Football; the latter was so skimpy it made the package feel cheap. But that’s not a problem with the NBA title; the printed manual is sufficiently detailed for the novice gamer. In both games, a highly detailed manual is available for viewing within the game, though NOT while you’re playing a game, which is what makes a print version so valuable.

As in previous years, you can import a senior class from the sister-title, ESPN College Hoops, into the NBA game. True sim fans rejoice, at that! But ultimately, this review is being written prior to having a copy of ESPN College Hoops in hand, so how well it works this year is not yet clear; stay tuned for our review of that title for FULL details.

In all, ESPN NBA Basketball is a huge improvement over last year’s model and with the innovation of the 24/7 mode, has something to offer that EA Sports has no reply to. After trailing NBA Live last season, Sega Sports is back in the game and blazing a fastbreak to the basket; this year’s version scores a buzzer-beater win over NBA Live.

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Tags: ESPN NBA Basketball

Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Nov 24th, 2003 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews, Xbox Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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