NBA Street Vol. 2

"Just call him Dr. Dunkenstein!!!"

Wow, what a great game. It truly takes skill to develop a sports game that stays true to its real-life roots while simultaneously bringing in just the right amount of silliness to make it fun for even anti-sports fans. I really don’t like sports. I totally suck at them in real life, I have no interest in keeping up with them on TV, and I have an overall disinterest with the sport. NBA Street Vol. 2 doesn’t alienate people like me, which I can really appreciate after playing games like Madden, NBA Live, or any other sports sim. It’s great fun for anyone, but enough yakking, let’s go more in-depth.

Graphics: 8/10
I like the visuals here a lot, they really tread the fine line between looking too real or too arcadey very nicely, and it comes together very well. It also holds up well for a multiplatform game, where the Gamecube usually gets the short end of the stick, here it was treating equally and looks almost identical to the PS2 and Xbox versions. I didn’t give it a higher score because I’ve seen better on the ‘Cube, and many of the players look generic. Back in the day when NBA Jam ruled the courts on SNES and Genesis, it was acceptable for faces and statures to look pretty much the same, but here it’s pretty much just generic white guy, generic black guy, generic Asian guy, etc.

Sound: 6/10
I’m not big on hip-hop, but it’s tolerable here. I have a couple big complaints in this area however that just couldn’t allow me to score this section higher. First off, and maybe it was just me, but I could not for the life of me get the song to change mid-game. The pause menu gives you a play list option, but the only way I could get my favorite songs to play was to manually turn off all other songs but the one I wanted to hear. Second, if you thought Joe “the Show” (the commentator) was bad on the first NBA Street, you should hear the commentator on this game. He honestly sounds like a white taxi driver in his mid-fifties trying to talk “black.” He’s constantly mouthing off stinkers like “We in Philadelphia, Philly, where its illy” and “You can jus call him Docta Dunkenstein.” You can always turn off the commentator, but I would have really liked to have a decent commentator after I hated the one in the first NBA Street.

Gameplay: 9/10
The gameplay here is insane; it’s a total blast and is even more fluid than its predecessor. I can best describe it as a Tony Hawk game on the courts. As you play a game, you can string together tricks that give you trick points, which are separate from the actual game points. When you build your trick meter up you are allowed to pull off a shot called a “Gamebreaker”, which gives you points and subtracts points from your opponent. It is appropriately named, because it can make or break a close game. I have very few complaints about the gameplay, but here goes. Usually this isn’t a problem, but sometimes the game won’t pass to the intended player, which can be frustrating when you have a teammate open but the ball gets passed to the guy covered by two men. Also, if by some chance both of your teammates go up and set you up for the alley-oop, the game will pass to the first one who jumped, so you may be meaning to pass to the guy who is highest in the air, but you will pass to the guy who is already falling back to the ground and is past the hoop making the ball fly across the court and usually putting the ball in the other team’s hands. I know that sounds confusing, but I think EA Big could have ironed this out.

Replay: 8/10
As great as I think this game is, I really don’t think it justifies a purchase unless you can get ahold of it for less than a 20 spot, because I can’t imagine this game keeping you entertained for much more than two weeks on single player. Multiplayer is a different story, and if you have someone to play with this may keep you busy for months. There’s lots of unlockables, but I rented this with a Game Freedom Pass, and I felt that I got all I was going to get out of it in ten days.

Rent/Buy: Depends
If you have a lot of friends that can chill with you and play multiplayer then definitely pick this up when the price drops. If you are planning to play this by yourself, go ahead and rent it, you will probably blow the game out in a few days and still get some fun after that, but it does get a little old after awhile, simply because you are basically doing the same thing over and over.

Final Score: 8/10
Great while it lasts, better than the first, try it out!

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/28/03