NBA Inside Drive 2003

"A little improvement over last year's game"

Every year, a sports game gets updated. So this year NBA Inside Drive 2003 was made. It is a mix between simulation and arcade-y. There are other titles to pick from this year. Should NBA Inside Drive 2003 be your choice?

The whole thing started way back when the Xbox was launched and NBA Inside Drive 2002 came out. It was a fun game to play and I enjoyed it. NBA Inside Drive 2003 still has that fun factor in the game and that is a good thing to have.

Gameplay

As I said before, this is fun. Heck, I think that this is more fun than NBA2K3, that is just a matter of opinion. The AI can be challenging at first, though. When I started to play, the difficulty was set at rookie. You can get many steals if you know how to do it on rookie. Then, it got boring for me, so I decided to move up and changed it to veteran. It was kind of tough for me, but I wanted something more harder. The last difficulty was all-star. Man, that was hard to me. I was observing my friend playing this game. When you play on rookie, you make almost all of your shots. And on veteran, you make about half your shots. On all-star, you make about 30-40%. The reason I notice is because while you are shooting, you see the bar under your player. When you hold long enough, your bar fills up.

Let me tell you what is in the game. The menus are done more very nicely compared to last year's. It is very easy to navigate through the menus. Every NBA team and player is in the game except for Yao Ming. He was replaced by a guy named Zaun. There is a practice mode where you can shoot around. There is a thing that tells you how good you are shooting, but I think that it is pretty useless. Last year, there wasn't no dynasty mode, but this year they were smart enough to put in a dynasty mode. There is an exhibition mode where you can play your friends.

This year's post game is slightly better than last year's. You could push softly or very hard at the defender and then step out or shoot, or do a hook shot. There are some minor collision problems in the game. And some penalty problems, too. Sometimes when you grab for the rebound and close to the out of bounds, they will call out of bounds and it is their ball. There are some rebounding issues, too. In my own eyes, I could see that my player did not goal-tend, but no, they have to call it goal-tending. Come on, there are not a whole lot of variety in dunking the ball and lay-ups. This is the area that they need to improve on badly because NBA2K3 has many dunks.

There is no Xbox Live and that is a really big disappointment. It is like Sega is schooling Microsoft on how to make your game to be able to be played online.

Graphics

NBA Inside Drive 2003 looks the same as last year. There are some slowdowns, though. When the ball is rolling on the rim, the game will have a slowdown until you get the rebound. Almost everyone looks like there their NBA counterpart. Some faces like Tyronn Lue does not even look like him. The players taunt after they made their dunks and different animations before the player shoots a free throws. There are cut scenes that show people coming on and off the bench.

The stadiums look great. There are lights and they shine everywhere on the court. The crowds for one thing are not that good. They are just horrible! Just look at them. They look like the same person all over the place. This was something that I found out. When you shoot free throws, they wave those long things up in the air, right? Then when I was staring at the crowds moving those things, they look like zombies moving left to right. They could do better with the crowds.

Sound

One thing I would like to say is that this game is the first game that has four commentators. Three on the booth and one on the floor. I think that this is cool because it adds more variety. Marques Johnson and Kevin Calabro are back and they also added Kenny Smith to the team. Kenny Smith is only there to talk smack to people. That is all he does. Like last year, some moments will be funny. The fourth member is Akemi Takei and Akemi provides updates of injuries and shares her feelings at the end of the game.

Replayability

The game has 25 seasons for you to play in, so that would be a long time to play that long. The one thing that really hurts the game is that there is no Xbox Live. If there was, there would be lots of replayability because you play different people instead of the computer.


Rent or Buy

If you like basketball and low in cash, I prefer you to buy the game because it is fun. It does not matter if this game has a mix of simulation and arcade-y. And if you are curious how good this game is, you should rent it because you will might like it.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/26/03, Updated 03/26/03