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Platform
Xbox
Genre
Sports
Publisher
Activision
Developer
Black Ops
ESRB
T (Teen)
Released
Q3 2002
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- Animations, especially on the
variety of dunks, is excellent
- Trash-talking gestures after baskets
- Some current real-life b-ball court legends get their props
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- Too easy to steal the ball, too
hard to block it
- CPU almost never misses a shot
- Collision detection takes a vacation
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Review: NBA Inside Drive 2003 (XBox)
Review: Street Hoops (Playstation 2)
Review: NBA Jam (Wii)
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Street
Hoops
Score: 6.3 / 10
No multi-million-dollar contracts, fancy
quarter-million dollar cars, supermodel girlfriends, television
interviews, packed NBA arenas with thousands cheering them on. Street
ballers play for the love of the game on the paved courts and urban
playgrounds of America, not the love of the almighty dollar and
adoration of the masses. Many have mad skills that few professional
players own in their repertoire. This is the game of basketball that
Activision is hoping to capture with Street Hoops for the Xbox, a title
similar in spirit but not in its execution to the excellent EA Big
Sports’ NBA Street.
I actually had big hopes for this game. Taking its cue from NBA Street,
Street Hoops attempts to re-create the street basketball scene
faithfully in video game form. The NBA’s finest and fabricated hoopsters
from NBA Street are replaced by
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authentic current playground b-ball legends
like my hometown’s AO, who plays at Philly’s 11th and Lombard, and
Brooklyn’s Rucker Park duo of 1/2 Man 1/2 Amazing and Headache. There
are players from famous courts sprawled across the US of A, from East
Coast to West, including the barnyard backyard court of the
naughty-sounding French Lick, Indiana, the original stomping grounds of
NBA Hall of Famer Larry |
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Bird. You can even create your own player if you want.
In addition to having a true representation of playground players and
locales, there is the inclusion of lines of clothing and sporting
accessories and sneakers including And 1, G.O.A.T. Gear, Sean John, and
Rocawear to outfit your players that can be purchased at Footaction with
money won betting on your team’s performance. It’s one advertising logo
after another thrown in your face.
As in the movie “White Men Can’t Jump”, you place wagers (with the local
bookie) from a straight-up bet on who wins the game to which team makes
the most dunks. You can also tattoo your team, buy some flashy gold
wear, or give them a new ‘do. If you lose and are strapped for some
Benjamins, there’s even a pawnshop where you can sell some of that
jewellery for some cold, hard cash. The money also is needed to unlock
new players and courts.
There are a few different game settings to select from in either a timed
or score limit setting on a full or half court in two main game modes:
World Tournament (I don’t know why they call it “World” Tournament,
because you only play on courts located within the United States) and
Lord of the Court. Street Hoops has a lot of little extras that could
have made it the Jordan-era Bulls of video game basketball.
But when it comes down to Street Hoop’s actual gameplay on the court,
you’ll find out the game more resembles the awful post-Jordan Bulls. The
developers seemed to never be sure if they were looking to create an
arcadish NBA Jam-type title or one with a little more realistic
simulation involved, but they at no time really successfully mesh a
definitive style of play into the game.
The worst atrocity of the gameplay is the terrible defensive and
collision detection physics. You can bump into players at will with
little worry of being impeded in your progress to the basket and trying
to box out on defense is a joke. In fact, there’s almost no need to try
to play defense at all or attempt to block a shot once the other team
gets past half court into the offensive zone, because you rarely ever
come up with a block and the CPU-controlled team comes down with the
offensive rebound 99% of the time.
Not that there’s too many of those to go around anyway, because the CPU
has an almost perfect shooting percentage every game. The only way you
can get the ball away from the CPU team is by stealing it. Stealing is
made ridiculously easy, just by pushing the corresponding steal button
over and over you will wind up eventually stripping the ball away at
least half the time.
There are a ton of specialized “ankle breaking” moves for each player
that help gets a player to the basket quicker for a dunk. Dunking for
almost every point is the easiest way to win. It’s not too hard to dunk,
even with the smallest player on the court. You only have to be wary of
the CPU shoving your players into turnovers.
Graphically, Street Hoops isn’t bad, especially the animations of the
players on the court. From dribbling and shooting to the vast array of
dunks, the players look and perform very true-to-life. I love the little
trash-talk gestures that both you and your opponent show each other
after a big dunk. The courts themselves and the rendered backgrounds are
done nicely too. But the onlookers surrounding the action are plain ugly
in their flat and 2D demeanor. Street Hoops’ soundtrack employs the
sounds of a lot of today’s rap and urban music stars, including Method
Man and Redman, DMX, Master P, Cypress Hill, Xzibit, and Ludacris. If
you like the game’s tunes, then you’ll be disappointed with Street
Hoops, because most of the time the music is so low in the background
you can’t even hear it. Also, the banter from the unseen “announcer” is
too repetitive and annoying to add any flavor to the action on the
court.
Too bad the developers didn’t spend as much time working out the
gameplay as much as they did securing the clothing and sneaker licenses
and honing the extra-curricular elements of the game not related to the
authentic game of street ball. This could have been a great title but
instead its nowhere near the quality of NBA Street, even though Street
Hoops does away with NBA ballhoggers and fictitious characters and
replaces them with the playground legends of today’s American hoop
scene. Sadly, the only time I really enjoyed the game experience was
when I teamed up with my son to see how many sweet dunks and alley-oops
we could pull off.
This could have been the ultimate street basketball title. But with the
bad defensive AI and awful collision detection problems and the
unrealistic every-shot-is-good offensive abilities of the CPU
opposition, the only ones who may be interested in buying Street Hoops
are players that have actually hooped it up on some of the real-world
courts contained in the game. For serious basketball video gamers,
Street Hoops is best as a rental to tide you over until you can go out
and buy NBA2K3.
- Lee Cieniawa
lcieniawa@armchairempire.com
(October 10, 2002) |
