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Systems > PlayStation 2 > N > NBA 08 > Staff Review
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Review by Felix Arabia
October 18, 2007
You see, The Life v3, much like its two predecessors, attempts to put the player into more than just simple NBA games. NBA 08, as the game is officially titled, allows you to select your favorite team and witness their rollercoaster ride of a season, a season involving all sorts challenges and drama.
However, rather than explicitly state what you’ll witness at the get-go, allow me to list a few things you won’t get to do in The Life v3.
*You won’t get to fight fans in the stands
*You won’t fight other players during the course of a game
*You won’t come across any fraudulent referees
*You won’t play as real players
In all seriousness, that’s okay. The Life mode will begin with you, as a rookie, playing for the repeating NBA championship team of your choice. Your coach is calling it quits after this upcoming year, and it’s up to you and your teammates to solidify his legacy and your city’s image. This isn’t an NBA spin to the canceled ESPN show Playmakers.
Beginning the pre-season in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, you’ll become accustomed to all the made-up players that consist of your team. Even though you won’t use real players in the Life mode (though you certainly will if you just want to play, say, a regular season), you’ll become familiar with the fabricated fellows who you’ll play as. Scrimmages, practices, and pre-season games must be completed before you can get into the regular season and ultimately the playoffs. The problem is that the story gets off to a rather slow, tedious start.
You’ll have to learn the controls – basically how to shoot, post-up, etc. Each playable portion of The Life v3 requires you to fulfill some sort of criteria list. You can’t advance the story unless you’ve done that, and this can either be extremely easy or insanely frustrating since some of the goals, such as scoring a certain number of points with a given player, can be very, very specific.
It also doesn’t help that your team feels very disjointed. The loading screen appears far too often, killing any sort of fluidity that was beginning to formulate between events. The cutscenes, usually involving decent voice acting, often suffer from the lulls that appear thanks to the loading screen. It just hurts the presentation because the storytelling could have been more intriguing had its presentation been tighter. It’s still at times enjoyable, but it certainly could have been better.
Nevertheless, that’s just one aspect to NBA 08. The other, obviously, involves just playing NBA basketball. You can play as any of the thirty NBA teams, choosing a plethora of options ranging from how long you want the quarters to how smart you want the AI.
There is one glaring problem here, though. A lot of the most recent draft picks aren’t anywhere to be found in this game. For example, you won’t find former Buckeyes standout Mike Conley Jr., nor will you get to see Gators poster child Joakim Noah. It sort of implies that either these players were unavailable as SCEA Sports Studios was putting on the final touches, or perhaps they just didn’t feel compelled to include them even if they could have.
Either way, there are various indicators pointing to how far they were willing to take NBA 08. The graphics, for example, look primitive. The NBA Live and NBA 2K series look way better – even on the PS2. Here, the players are blocky, their animations aren’t entirely fluid, the lighting looks like its from the 64 bit generation in places . . . it just takes away from the overall experience.
The actual basketball playing is done well, but it’s difficult to forgive the presentation. There is one aspect to NBA 08 I must give it props for, though. It has an ingenious doohickey called the TrueShot Indicator, a tri-colored arc that appears over your player’s head when shooting the ball. Working like a traffic light in terms of color, the TrueShot Indicator will show your chance for success at taking a shot. If you release the ball when it’s on the green part of the arc, you’re going to make the shot almost always. Yellow indicates that it may or may not go in, and red obviously means you’re going to miss.
This invention makes so much sense to me. It’s just a shame that the rest of the game lacks the innovation that this one gameplay aspect contains. Either way, however, you probably will enjoy NBA 08 and its Life mode if you are particularly fond of professional basketball. It provides a decent basketball experience, just not a great one.
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Average As a whole, this game is quite average. You're unlikely to find much of anything remarkable about it at all. |
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Staff reviews represent the opinion of the individual staff member that wrote them and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the site staff as a whole. If you disagree with the contents of this review, you may click to leave feedback on our dedicated forum. Thank you!
| HG 2010 Fundraising Progress: $233 / $3000 (8%) |
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Title: NBA 08 |
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NCAA Football 06 is another PlayStation 2 game in the Sports genre that has been attracting activity lately, so you might want to check it out and see what all of the fuss is about!
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