Well it’s been 7 years since 2K1. That means it’s been 7 years that I’ve been BEGGING for Visual Concepts to include dunk and 3pt shooting contests. I’ve been paying some good coin for these games and I mean really, is it too much to ask? They put that 24/7 mode in the game and I hated it. Why put so much effort into 24/7 when you could have All-Star Saturday as an additional game mode? Every time a new NBA 2K game was released, I’d hope and pray to no avail. Well after all these years, my prayers have finally been answered with NBA 2K8.

I fell in love with NBA 2K7 and honestly didn’t think this game could get any better. Not only has Visual Concepts made the gameplay better, but they’ve also upped the ante on the graphics and animation. If you thought NBA 2K7 looked like a real game, wait until you feast your eyes on this. I don’t know how they do it but they seem to get the perfect lighting, reflections and textures to make the court, crowd and players all look real. If anyone walks into a room while you are playing this game, they might think you are watching a real game…for a few seconds at least.

Visual Concepts added some cool new features. The 24/7 mode is now gone and I couldn’t be happier. I don’t care about blinging my crib or answering phone calls from celebrities. They have now added NBA Blacktop. Included in Blacktop mode are the Dunk Contest, 21, Dunk School, 3pt Shootout and Pick Up Game.

The Dunk Contest is presented beautifully. It takes place in Las Vegas. There’s tons of lights and glamour and glitz as you would expect. You start off by picking 4 dunkers from a pre-made list. The dunkers on the list are the best dunkers in the industry. For some strange reason, you can’t pick your created players. That’s right, there’s no option to pick any of your created players or other non-dunkers in the league. Why does it have to be this way? It doesn’t make sense at all. Oh well. On to the dunking. Dunks are performed by picking a jump style and then a dunk style. It’s basically two movements of your control stick. The first movement is your jump style or take-off. The second is your dunk style. After you time it correctly and take off, you have to press the right trigger at the right time on the power bar for the dunk to execute. It’s kinda like when you hit a golf ball in a video game you have to hit the button at just the right point on the power bar to get a good hit.

Scoring is determined by style, difficulty and air time. You’ll do 3 rounds of dunking with 3 dunks per round. After each round, the lowest scoring dunker will get eliminated. While the presentation of the dunk contest is excellent, I was surprised to see that there were no celebrity basketball professionals on the sidelines holding up scorecards. Would it be too hard to take some of the players on your classic All-Star teams, dress them up in suits and have them post up score cards after every dunk? I got tired of the emcee constantly looking up at the scoreboard while quoting Richard Dawson from the Family Feud, “And the scoreboard says….BING!”  I guess I have to wait until next year and pay another $60 to get that feature.

The 3pt Shootout is pretty awesome. There’s 5 sets of 5 balls. You have a time limit to shoot all the balls and hit as many 3 pointers as you can. Unlike the Dunk Contest, you can use created players in the 3pt Shootout. The presentation of the 3pt Shootout is nothing like the Dunk Contest though. It’s basically a bunch of guys at a public basketball court having some fun. Why doesn’t it have the same presentation as the Dunk Contest?!!? Another gripe I have about the 3pt shootout is that you can’t use the X button to shoot. You are forced to use the right analog stick. If you are like me and don’t use the analog stick for shooting, this will piss you off. It makes no sense what so ever to have not allowed use of the X button for shooting 3 pointers.  However, after many attempts I’ve been successful at using the analog stick for the purpose of the 3pt contest.

The 21 game is cool. It plays just like how I remember playing it at Dugger Park. I think they should have also thrown in Horse, Pig and Buckets. There are many schoolyard basketball games they could have added but didn’t. Maybe I should be a consultant on the next NBA 2K game.

The character creation is just like NBA 2K7 and it suffers the same problems. It’s very detailed but the problem with the character creation tool is that when you make adjustments to one feature and then adjust another feature, the previous adjustments you made get auto-adjusted like it’s constraining proportions. So ultimately, you can’t make your characters look the way you want. They end up looking like offshoots of other characters.  Even with NBA 2K5 I was able to make all of my close friends and myself and they all looked different. This new approach that they have given us makes the process of character creation a necessary evil. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. I made a black character. His skin was dark brown. Further down the line I adjusted the color of his beard to make it darker and then his whole color became 2 shades lighter. One tiny adjustment further down the line screwed up his whole skin color. That’s just one minor thing that happens. The sideburns, for the most part, don’t even properly connect with the hairline. They have tone features that can make your skin look light or flushed. Why? I want to pick a color, nose and face that looks like mine. Unlike the older games, I’m unable to make characters that look different from each other.

After you create your character and save your roster, you can’t fully edit the character. I noticed that one of my black characters had a very long nose. I went back to EDIT the character from the roster menu, and I was unable to change any of his facial features. Rather than recreate the whole character and put him back on my custom team, I just said fuck it and left it alone.

There is also another new attribute that they’ve added called minutes. Minutes is supposed to determine the amount of time your character gets to play by default? Well if your minutes are set to zero and you try to put that character in your lineup you can’t. He is stuck in reserve mode until you go back to rosters and manually give him some minutes and move him out.

2K8 plays beautifully. In pretty much all of the older games there was a real issue with my characters crashing the boards. I would set the crash boards slider really high but they never seemed to get a lot of offensive rebounds. It just didn’t happen that often. With 2K8 I was amazed to see how many offensive rebounds my big men were pulling down. It was like night and day. They also have it set up to where you can control players that aren’t carrying the ball on offense. This is great for setting up plays and alley oops. There’s nothing worse then calling a play and having the cpu screw it up.

The AI is much better and much smarter this time around. It was cool to see more hustling and diving after loose balls. The players also interact more than ever. I saw 2 of my players slap five after an assist and score. It happened several times.

They’ve added a new Lock On defense tool which takes away from the game in my opinion. With Lock On defense you let the AI do the defense for you and you literally can shut a player down with it. I don’t use it because it’s cheap. I think this feature was put in the game for people who have trouble putting the D on the AI players.

One other gripe about gameplay that vexes me is the fact that you can’t use passing icons for inbound passes.  It just doesn’t work and it never has.  I’d like to know why.  With the use of passing icons for inbound passes, you could probably setup inbound alley oops and other plays.

For some odd reason, the manual in this game is only 13 pages long. In contrast, the 2K7 manual is 41 pages long.  See where I’m getting at?  Now because I’m a veteran 2K fan, I already know how to play their games. If you are new to NBA 2K, good luck after reading the manual. The game interface isn’t as intuitive as it use to be and they left a lot out of the manual. Also, they tell you that you can tour the world with a character to enter different Dunk Contests an earn new props and dunkers. This feature was no where to be found in the game.

I’m hoping Visual Concepts devs are reading this review because this paragraph is for them. I love the new Dunk Contest and 3pt Shoot Out. It’s a damn shame I had to wait so long to get those features that I wanted. I really wish that they would give the 3pt Shoot Out a better presentation. In fact, since there is an All-Star game during season play, why not have All-Star Saturday included? You could do the Old Timers game and during the half time show have the 3pt Shoot Out and Dunk Contest. Throw some guys on the sidelines with score cards and add commentary to it. MAKE IT LIKE THE REAL THING! Visual Concepts has all the tools necessary to do this. PLEASE ADD THESE FEATURES TO THE NEXT GAME. As far as the character creation tool goes, scrap it and go back to the way it was in 2K5. Or even better, how about a feature to IMPORT all your created characters from the previous game into the next. This would solve a lot of problems.

I think my complaints outweigh my praise in this review but don’t get me wrong. NBA2K8 is by far the BEST NBA basketball game to grace a console. It’s beautiful to look at, fun to play and has a feature set that is unmatched. If they can tweak what they’ve already given us and provide an even better experience, all of us 2K fans will be very happy.

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