Tea Leaves

NBA Street V3

One of my more beloved games on the Xbox was NBA Street V2. But, pulling off the advanced tricks with the Xbox controller was always too hard because the Xbox controller only allowed you three "turbos". Still, when you got in the right rythm, your little avatars could dance around, pass the ball off someone's head and then through the air to a thunderous dunk. This made for more fun in 3-on-3 than my other Xbox basketball experience.

So, when V3 of the game came out, I made sure to pick it up on the PS2 so I could use all four triggers for turbo dunking.

The new version of the game has a flashier look, more detailed character models, and a more complicated trick system. Rather than just holding down a trick button (square on the PS2), you can now hold the triggers down and push the right stick around to perform dribbling tricks. This seems cool, but in practice I can't remember more than 2 or 3 moves anyway. All the old dunks are still here, plus the magic head passes.

Minor complaints are that it seems to be hard to pull off the most advanced tricks without perfect timing on the turbos. Holding down the four triggers, plus circle and having your player move towards the basket is harder than it looks. Also, none of the camera modes are really quite right, which can make it hard to follow the game.

The other major gameplay change is the "interactive" gamebreaker. Here you make your player fly ludicrously high in the air, and if you are fast with the stick, and good with your timing you can throw the ball around and pass it to your teammates for a multiplayer alley-oop and rack up a huge combo that swings the score of the game up to 5 points in your favor. Again, this is flashy but too complicated for me, because I am old.

Overall, if you liked V2, V3 is more of the same, only shinier, and with online. I haven't tried the online, since my PS2 is not on the network. I wouldn't want to play this game with strangers anyway, since I'm sure to lose.