NBA Street Vol. 2

"You could of thought that I would give this a higher score."

This game seems to be perfect for me. After all, I am a hardcore video game fan, a hardcore music fan, and a hardcore basketball fan. You must be thinking, ''If your all that, why give this an 8?'' It's elementary, I'm grading this game on a hardcore scale. Further detail will be explained later on the review.

Concept
Basically, your here to play some real street ball. You travel across the nation to play hoops, get reward points to collect various old ballers and other stuff, and maybe recruit some off the hook dude from another team into yours. After handling many up in coming ballers, you might find yourself face-to-face with NBA stars like Kobe, T-Mac, and C-Webb. Honestly, I'm not done with everything yet, so I'll get back to you on this.

One thing I've notice is that in a free play or multi player game, you can play as any team in the NBA, an All-Star comprised with most of the most talented stars today, and an old skool team with NBA (or ABA) players from the 60's to the 90's. Some of the old skool ballers range from Jerry West (guard of the 60's Lakers I believe) to Julius ''Dr. J'' Erving (I think he was forward for the 70's Phily Sixers) to Larry Bird (guard for the 80's Celtics). Leading into my first beef with this game...there are some people that should be in this roster that were not included in the game. For example, Hakeem Olajuwon, Charles Barkley, Dennis Rodman (with some type of feature to customize the hair color), and John Sally (I'm joking with John)

Sound
The music kind of reminds me of Def Jam: Vendetta. The music most of the time sets the tempo of the game whether for the good or the bad. Plus here's another complaint: who sings in the intro video. Come on, a lot of people on my block has this game and be wondering who's rapping there. Being the DJ that I am, I've yet to figure out who's rapping to the beat. Well back to the subject, the soundtrack is alright, although they could have added more song with crazy beats. Songs like ''Basketball'' by Lil' Bow wow and ''Flava In Your Ear'' by Craig Mack. One more thing, DJ Cucumber Slice gets annoying after a while.

Visuals
I'm not really sure how to explain the way it looks. It's kind of like toon shading, but in some aspects its not. It's on the boarder of toon shading and NBA Live graphics. It's really interesting how this came around.

Gameplay
Like all EA Big games, it's really easy to pick up the controller and play. The d-pad is to move, X is to pass or switch players, circle is to shoot, triangle is to jump or set a pick, square is to do trick moves (mad dribbling skills) or steal, and all the shoulder bottoms are turbo. Once again, the combination of the turbo bottoms in conjunction with the trick bottom can perform various tricks. Try experiment and apply it on the court for major trick points and set up a Gamebreaker or pocket it for the coveted Level 2 Gamebreaker (which is unblockable). I'm just kinda disappointed that theres no online play on this game.

Replay
This is why I love this game. There is many things to do in this game. There's getting mew nicknames, getting more throw back jerseys (retro jerseys), unlocking more old timers, unlocking courts, unlocking the St. Lunatics, plus holding a party with four of your friends and let the real trash talking begin.

In conclusion, this is a great game thats near perfection; however it may take a big time fan of every subject of the game to realize it's flaws. This maybe minor and all, but it still is a nuisance to some people.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 05/19/03, Updated 05/19/03