NBA 2K7 (PS3)

One of the benefits to the PlayStation 3 hitting toward the end of the year is that sports game developers have time to tweak the game that went out on the 360 just a few weeks prior. In some cases, that time is spent simply integrating the PS3's SIXAXIS controller functionality, but Visual Concepts and poppa company 2K Sports managed to make a few minute tweaks to the game to help make it an overall stronger experience, if mostly in the visuals department.

NBA 2K7 has been a solid basketball sim for years now, and the inclusion of PlayStation Network support has only helped strengthen this. The online play works in much the same was as it has for years now, with the addition of finally offering a persistent login and buddies list. 30-person full season leagues, exhibition, tournaments and one-on-one games are all here, and all of a particular player's habits and trends are tracked by their VIP, their online/offline profile. Post-game surveys let you flag asshole players for others in the future, which is a nice little touch. Unlike the sometimes stuttery play of EA's titles, the 2K servers seem far more adept at handling big games, too.

Nearly everything you can play online, you can play offline, including setting up some Practice matches (useful if you want to learn how to shoot the new free-throws, but more on those in a second), playing a single game, and then tucking into the game's more meaty modes like a full season and even The Association, the game's multi-season career mode that lets you handle all parts of a team's progress drilling down from hiring/firing coaches, staff and players right to playing every single game yourself if you'd like. Deeper than your standard franchise mode, you actually have the onus of creating practice times for players, maintain progressive fatigue, work out trades (even three-way ones if you can get them to work, though I never did), and geek out on all the stats generated by the computer and your play time.

If The Association is the game's simulation mode, 24/7 is its more arcade, street ball component. The thing is, this wasn't nearly as well fleshed-out as the more natural fit of the simulations. Being a fan of arcade basketball games over sims most of the time (mostly due to animations and ball physics), it was a little insulting to watch what must've been French mime clones of NBA players ham-fisted into a "story" of being an up-and-comer noticed by Shaq and taken to a legends tournament. Though the NBA players will rarely talk, it's probably a blessing given how stilted and cringe-worthy the dialogue is. Still the core game is indeed a modest take on street ball, and it's better than most of the NBA Street contenders out there (which probably says more for the competition than it does about 24/7's gameplay).

Though there are some holes in the AI from time to time, you'll often find plenty of pressure from teams, and even some nice replication of particular squads that love to push the game in a given direction. You'll feel like you're fighting against a tide of momentum, which is something I frankly didn't expect to get since it's so nuanced a lot of the time, but perhaps that speaks to the game's sense of immersion. That's broken a few times during things like loose ball scrambles, but you'll notice some smart double-teaming, and great coverage and rotations.


The game's newest feature -- and really the only one that properly takes advantage of the PS3's SIXAXIS controller -- is the free-throw mechanic. You essentially grip the controller in the center, and then pitch back over your head then push forward with a little roll. It basically feels like you're really shooting the shot once you get it down, but you still feel like a tool doing it until you really figure the whole mechanic out, and that'll take a while given that nearly every player has different shot timings. I didn't even know until about halfway through my time with the game that you could turn back on the old right analog stick shooting method until I stumbled onto it while bravely navigating the game's crap menus. Whoops. Once you get it down, the shots do feel a little more natural than just flicking a stick, but only barely.

Throughout the core game's basketball roots, though, there's a level of presentation here that's quickly approaching broadcast level events. It's not all there, mainly due to the odd clipping error (though that has been improved nicely over last year, along with far, far better cloth physics on the uniforms), and there are still the incredibly annoying invisible walls that block progress while still allowing animations to play out, but these are starting to fade into what is a far more impressive display of momentum and power.

Drop-stepping into the paint has actual oomph now, and watching players' hands actually track with the ball, their heads making moves to look (or even head fake) where they're going and just the combination of solid physics and inertia actually being translated fairly well is fantastic stuff. Unfortunately, if you want to run the game in "true HD", the 1080p overhead on all those physics will cost you in the framerate department. Otherwise, the game runs at a fairly respectable (if not entirely smooth) framerate.

There are some issues with the player models too. Some of them are indeed at the point where you can recognize them just by face, but those are the star players, and all the other minor players are nowhere near as detailed. It's understandable given how much time probably went into modeling them, but the gulp of detail between the two types is a little frightening. Seeing sweat roll down a player's skin, however, is not. It's awesome, and if next-gen has proven one thing, it's that sports games can do really good sweat. Okay, on second thought that is a little scary.

The audio is a little more solid, though that's only because it's so minimal to begin with. The crowd generally isn't too into things, and the commentary from Kenny Smith and Kevin Harlan gets repetitious after, well, a single freakin' game for some comments. It's not that bad, though hearing the same pre-game commentary is annoying. Luckily the chatter from the players is what takes the fore here, and it's done quite well. Calling for picks, shouting out the situation, calling plays (on-the-fly formations and plays can be done with a press of the d-pad directions) and the like are all quite nicely done.

Oddly enough the soundtrack is mostly flicked off, perhaps because Visual Concepts wanted to allow some songs to crop up as you played more of the game (or at least you'd have the option), and to be honest, I'm not that much of a hip-hop fan to begin with, so I didn't mind, but turning the songs on means delving into the sea of menus that 2K cooked up, and that's just painful.

Luckily, few other parts of NBA 2K7 are painful. The street ball section may be a little more half-baked than the rest of the game, but extensive career options, great online play, and a downright solid game of basketball help VC and 2K Sports deliver the best roundball sim on the PS3.