Review of Playstation 2 version
Written: Mar 16 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Aside from the flaws, still the best basketball game ever.
Cons: Computer makes 80-90% of their shots. Game fails to save certain settings.
The Bottom Line: Too flawed to earn a 5 star rating. Rent the game and see if the bugs bother you or not. If not, buy it when it's on sale.
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| PimpOil's Full Review: NBA 2K2 for Xbox |
As always, Epinions fails to set up a review page for yet another new PS2 game. So I thought I'd review the PS2 version here in case some PS2 owners were looking here to get a general review of the game.
GRAPHICS: I'll start with graphics to get them out of the way. Basically, they are great. Every court is finely detailed right down to floor polish and court accurate logos. There are only a few complaints I have with graphics. First, the nets don't animate like a real net would if you dunk the ball in (in fact, every shot is pretty much a "swish".) Second, the player faces are UGLY. Sam Cassel is normally an ugly dude to begin with, but this game makes him (and almost everyone else) look like angry trolls. Aside from those complaints, I generally think the graphics hold up really nice. The only really cheasy graphic element is the incredibly lame load screen for the games you start.
SOUND: I'm gonna have to blast this category a bit. Sound effects are dead-on. But the background music is generic rap and an actual rap song that sounds like it is by that extremely talentless and annoying Jermaine Dupri guy (you might remember him from that MTV Cribs episode as the dude with the elementary school Disney shirt with the massive Donald Duck on it.) I always rush past the intro movie just to avoid hearing his patheticly overused "uh huh, uh huh" rap vocal. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2002 at least got Nelly's "Number 1" song, while SEGA went the cheap route and got a hastily produced rap song about basketball, like Xibit's annoying song from Madden NFL 2001. The game's commentary is not bad actually, but as always it repeats itself and you end up turning it off. I prefer a "on the court" sound setup anyway with shoe squeeks and PA announcers. You can actually set up sound themes from the options menu, like "on the court", "in the stands", and a television broadcast theme.
CONTROL: The control is the tricky part. It is not like the old NBA Live style, so EA Sports fans will have to change to the "D" setting to emulate it. The only problem, and this is a serious one, is that the game fails to save your controller setup, so you have to reset it every time you turn the game on. The game also rediculously fails to save your plays that you set, the camera angle you choose to play with, and a couple other things as well. That is just plain bad programming and the developers (who had a decent reputation) left in an amateur bug that should have been picked up during any pre-release beta tests.
GAMEPLAY: This is the biggest complaint of all. The game has no option to adjust any gameplay like Electronic Arts always would let you do with their sports games. You end up with 3 difficulty settings: the lowest (where you win by well over 20 points every game, EVERY time), the middle one (where the computer makes 8/10 of it's shots and blocks almost every other shot you take), and the last one (which is only suitable for those advanced chess-playing computers that might stand a chance to at least lose by 20 points). The computer players block almost every shot you take while you will only block an average of 1 shot per game. The computer makes almost 90% of it's shots on any difficulty other than Rookie while you ALWAYS make about 70-75% of your shots. Of course, players still don't rebound very well unless you take control and do it yourself. Computer players will drive past you and dunk while you end up having to take a hook shot because it's near impossible to drive past a posted-up computer player.
OPTIONS: You can play Franchise, Season, Playoffs, Exhibition games, an arcadelike full-court street mode and a couple other gameplay types. Creating a player sucks because you can't use them in a Franchise. All players have generic "bars" that tell how good they are at offense, defense, etc. So there are no numerical values like in Electronic Arts sports games where you know for a fact which player on the team is the best 3-point shooter. In this game you have to estimate everything. The whole menu system in this game is too confusing and unorganized. There are too many seperate places to access memory card files and the titles for each option are vague. Checking stats is confusing too because there are "subcategories" that are a pain to navigate. It would be easier to just have a "all players/teams" stat category and a "team/player" stats category. Instead we get a bunch of jumbled categories and it just provides headaches. When you just want to see who the top rebounder in the league is or something like that. The way you select the game to play in a Franchise is goofy too. Instead of a calendar-like table with your team's days highlighted, you get a huge list of games for the weak that you have to waste more time than you need to scrolling through.
I keep trying to appreciate this game but it's so hard with all the incredibly stupid mistakes the developers made. It really is the best basketball game out there once you look past the long list of flaws. I just can't give it the full star rating because it is just too poorly developed compared to the pristine Electronic Arts games. I recommend anyone rent the game for a couple days to see if you can handle the negative aspects. I just hope you play on a difficulty other than Rookie or else you'll end up buying it and having to work harder than you should have to in order to win one lousy game. I'll recommend the game only because a basketball fan most likely wants the best game out there, despite any shortcomings.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
PimpOil
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Location: Michigan
Reviews written: 40
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