NBA Courtside 2002

"Oooo. Kobe Bryant airballs it, essentially throwing in the towel for Nintendo Sports."

OPENING STATEMENT
The Nintendo 64 was light on quality sports games. EA Sports was sporadic in porting their titles while Acclaim’s games were almost always downright horrible. This allowed Nintendo to sneak in with their basketball series and do quite well. Flash forward to the Game Cube, where EA and Sega will soon be laying their claim to the sports fans of the little cube that could. Nintendo can no longer get away with what they did on the Nintendo 64, and they failed to realize that. Read on to find out why NBA Courtside 2002 is stuck in 1998.

GAMEPLAY--4
NBA Courtside 2002 is a game that tried to be flashy, combining elements from both of EA’s successful series (NBA Live and NBA Street) into one super package. What they ended up with was a game that, with three or four passes, can find someone wide open under the basket. And if they have a halfway decent point guard, they can just dribble through everyone and go straight to the hoop. (I did it with Terrell Brandon. Imagine what you could do with Jason Kidd or Stephon Marbury.)

That’s right, NBA Courtside 2002 plays defense like the Gopher men’s basketball team: only when it is asked nicely to. Steals abound and blocks are easy to come by. But there is not any solid player defense to speak of. Rapidly pressing the steal button, even when behind a player, is far more likely to result in the ball than a reaching foul. And if you have any one over seven feet, just jumping at the same time as the shooter will block almost every shot. Instead of making a solid defensive scheme, Nintendo thought the flashy plays would be enough to appease gamers. They were horribly wrong.

When you are playing games on three minute quarters and getting scores in the sixties for each squad, something is wrong. It is far too easy to score in NBA Courtside 2002, in case you had not inferred that from my babbling earlier. Any decent three-point shooter will knock down ninety percent of their shots from behind the arc. I have yet to see anyone miss a shot within five feet of the hoop. It’s like ever shot is one of Terrell Brandon’s free throws. (By the way, Sega, Nintendo thought up a new free throw interface that worked. You should use that one, or stick with EA’s tried and true ‘T’ formula, rather than use this stupid field goal kicking free throw shooting thing that you have now. Ugh.) Also, there is a momentum meter at the top of the screen. This object just sits there and reminds you when you or your opponents have gone on a run. It does not seem to actually alter the gameplay at all, but it does state the obvious with a passion.

GRAPHICS--8
It’s impossible to deny that NBA Courtside 2002 looks very good. The animation is quite smooth, and the facial expressions are some of the best in the industry. The players are more realistic in their body structure than those in either NBA 2K2 or NBA Live 2000. The face mapping of many major NBA stars is done ultra-realistically, and they are easily recognizable as Allen Iverson or Kevin Garnett.

The environments and the crowds, however, look a bit plastic. And on replays, some jaggies show up on the edges of players and the ball. And some of the sheen of the parquet floors from the lighting is absolutely nauseating. There are tradeoffs, yes, but even with these glaring flaws, the graphics in NBA Courtside 2002 are some of the best seen to date in a sports game.

MUSIC--4
SOUND--1
The music in Courtside 2002 is pretty average. Think of any basic sports game theme song, and dumb it down a bit, and then you have NBA Courtside 2002’s theme. The songs is actually pretty campy, in their false enthusiasm. Think “Who Let the Dogs Out” without the freaky hair of the Baja Men.

At least the music is approaching average. The commentary is the worst that I have ever heard in a basketball game. First of all, it gets half of everything that it comments on wrong. The commentary consists of about thirty statements, each of which you will hear at least once a quarter unless you run the same play over and over again. On top of it all, the announcer’s voice is extremely annoying, almost as annoying as the voice of Joe the Show from NBA Street. The sound effects do nothing to help out this dire situation. So, what you end up with is a giant pile of fetid commentary and sound effects! Happy, happy, joy, joy!

CONTROL--7
I must say that controlling NBA Courtside 2002 was fairly easy. The configuration was done as well as could be with the oddly shaped GameCube controller. I did find myself inadvertently shooting instead of passing, and vice versa, at times, but I think this is because the ‘A’ button is so much better than the rest of the buttons on the face of the controller. The on-screen players have no delay when executing their moves, and the spins and jukes are easy to execute. Nintendo games may have issues elsewhere, but they almost always control superbly.

FUN--2
NBA Courtside 2002 was just no fun for me to play. I tried to get into it, I really did. But the bare bones approach to the game was really making it difficult to have any fun at all. The game modes in NBA Courtside 2002 are Season and Exhibition. Nothing else. No franchise, no tournament, no nothing. That is not fair to gamers. Also, if you do play a season, there are very few statistics and such to allow you to follow up on your players, and the computer accepts every trade without consequence. Why not make the computer think and reject trades? That is what makes seasons in video games challenging and fun! The only little addition to NBA Courtside that I enjoyed was seeing the skyline of each participating city before every game. Other than that little bit, extras are few and far between.

CHALLENGE--MEDIUM
The artificial intelligence puts up a fight in NBA Courtside. They are not about to concede to you. While it is a breeze for you to drive through their defense and score, they can do the same to you. The challenge comes from trying to stop the computer’s identical offensive juggernaut. If you can master the defensive side of the ball, all it takes is an average point guard to win every time. (See the gameplay section for more details.)

REPLAY VALUE--LOW
When a game has as few options as NBA Courtside 2002, there are not very many reasons to come back and play it often. The season is not very compelling to finish, because there is not any of the interesting things to do between games like there are in NBA Live 2002 and NBA 2K2. Basically, you just progress from game to game to game to game. This gets extremely boring after a while. The exhibition matches are not very fun either, because its hard to get any defensive plays going. And when you can never shut down your friends and family members, what really is the point of playing? Defense is half the fun!

PROS
*Excellent facial mapping for NBA stars.
*The first basketball game on the GameCube.
*A new free throw mechanism that actually works!

CONS
*The worst commentary in a basketball game . . . ever.
*No extra or special game play modes at all, except for Three Point Shootout. Oooo! Three Point Shootout!
*No one can play defense. It is like the Philadelphia 76ers out there.

CLOSING STATEMENT
Nintendo has managed to airball their first sports release on their new console, after having some resounding success on the last one with the original NBA Courtside, Ken Griffey Jr.’s Major League Baseball, 1080º Snowboarding, and the cartoonish Mario Sports games. This legacy did not translate well to the 128-Bit era, and let us hope that Nintendo gets their act together before 1080º Snowboarding 2 is released. I want some realistic boading action to go along with SSX Tricky.

OVERALL--4

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 02/18/02, Updated 02/18/02