#558 NBA Street Vol. 2

Posted: 17th May 2019 by Jeroen in Games
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784th played so far

Genre: Sports
Platform: Playstation 2/Gamecube/Xbox
Year of Release: 2003
Developer: EA Canada
Publisher: EA Sports BIG

I’ve not only played the main NBA series before, but NBA Jam introduced me to something closer to the street basketball we are going to get into here and I swear it’s come up as a minigame before. NBA Jam appealed to me because you’re playing with a small team, which felt like it made play a lot more accessible. NBA Street Vol. 2 promises something similar. It feels like this is a sports game that’s going to be more appealing and accessible to me.

Our Thoughts

I quite enjoyed playing NBA Street Vol. 2. It took a bit of practice, but I felt I learned the game quite quickly and it felt like the difficulty was tuned well – I didn’t feel like I was cheating the AI to overwhelm it, but I managed to win most of the time. Only by a few points each time, but that felt quite right. There’s a lot going on, but the game takes you through the tutorial quite quickly while going quite in depth, which helps the game a lot to be accessible. It gave me a lot of wins, which was useful for sure, but I really had to work at it.

And I needed those wins. Wins get you points that help you unlock further things. In most games, you would start off unlocking a new game mode in one or two games, a new location one or two more, and keep rewarding you early on. Here, I got one early, but I felt I had to play for quite a while to get anything else. I get that this might make sense for the curve long term, but I wish I could have seen a few more different things a bit sooner, just to feel like I’m doing something.

It’s a small complaint if I wanted to jump into the game for longer, I suppose, but even then it seems like there is so much content here that a faster start wouldn’t have mattered much. If anything, the changes would have gotten me excited, and I don’t think the extra practice would have been that important.

Final Thoughts

Again, one of the better sports game is one that doesn’t get too serious. The game isn’t too complicated and having a smaller team gave me a lot more chances to keep control of what was going on. All of this felt incredibly well balanced and easy to control.