When you’ve been the reigning video game hoops champ for the last few years, the next logical step is to add Jay-Z and Justin Bieber. Wait, what? NBA 2K13 is quick to tell you that its a Young Hova production, but did they make the on-court experience any better? Find out on Splitkick!
As the NBA’s billionaire owners and millionaire players continue to argue over money with no end in sight, the league’s fans are left without any professional basketball to turn to. Though it may seem like a poor consolation prize, NBA 2K12 is still coming out this year for all of the platforms you would expect. This year, 2K has taken their award-winning basketball experience on the go with an iPhone version. Will this portable solution be enough to sooth your desire for an actual NBA season?
NBA Jam was one of my favourite video games growing up. I was sad to see it fade into obscurity as new versions of the game watered down the formula, but I was pumped to get my hands on the NBA Jam reboot, which came out on Wii, PS3 and XBOX 360 last year. While I liked what I played of it, the new game didn’t strike me as something I’d be willing to pay full price for at this point in time.
Luckily for me, NBA Jam is now coming out on iPhone.
EA Sports has a tall mountain to climb when it comes to basketball. Over the past few years, the quality of NBA Live has waded in mediocrity and sales have tracked well behind the competition. Basketball gamers now swear by the 2K series and perceive NBA Live as a piece of junk.
In response, EA Sports has gone back to the drawing board by giving the series to a new developer and a new name. However, preview coverage has been sparse leading up to launch, and maybe this recent video of someone playing the NBA Elite 11 demo reveals why EA has been keeping the game in the dark.
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This is an on-going series where I discuss the thinking involved in Street Fighter that I’ve applied to basketball. If you want to see earlier entries in the series, hit the link: Part 1: Spacing, Part 2: Punishing Mistakes, Part 3: Resource Management
Exploitation of Weaknesses
When I play the computer in Street Fighter IV as Akuma, regardless of difficulty, I can almost always land a Raging Demon. I don’t know what the guys at Capcom did about the AI, but 99% of the time when I input that command, the computer just stands there and eats it. Human opponents in general are tougher to fool, but virtually everyone has weaknesses of some sort. When I play an opponent, one of the very first things I check is my opponent’s ability to block a cross-up. It’s a tactic that most casual players don’t understand and won’t figure out how to counteract it within the span of one match. When I notice that my opponent doesn’t have an answer for that, or any other tactic that I throw at them, I will repeatedly use that tactic until I win or until my opponent finds an answer.
This is an on-going series where I discuss the thinking involved in Street Fighter that I’ve applied to basketball. If you want to see earlier entries in the series, hit the link: Part 1: Spacing, Part 2: Punishing Mistakes
Resource Management
The goal of Street Fighter is to completely drain your opponent’s health meter before they can do the same to you. You achieve this by attacking your opponent. How you attack your opponent or defend yourself can vary wildly depending on what the health situation is. The easiest health situation to discuss resource management I can think of is when your opponent has a major life lead over you. When your opponent can finish you with one or two hits, you need to play much more conservatively in order to stand a chance of winning. Conversely, if you have a major life lead on your opponent, you may be able to win by “chipping them out” on wake-up with a projectile attack to avoid the risk of eating a last-ditch super move that could turn the tide.
This is an on-going series where I discuss the thinking involved in Street Fighter that I’ve applied to basketball. If you want to see earlier entries in the series, hit the link: Part 1: Spacing
PUNISHING MISTAKES
One of the most common mistakes in Street Fighter is a poorly-timed projectile attack. For instance, if I’m Ryu, and you properly react to my fireball, you can jump over the fireball and kick me in the face before I can do anything to defend myself. In Street Fighter, when your opponent makes a mistake, you want to punish them for their mistakes by hitting them with the most powerful attacks as possible.
For many years, I’ve been an avid basketball player. I’ve played in a few leagues, on a few school teams and participated in a few basketball camps. I am by no means the next LeBron James, but I had the skills to make some noise on almost any given local court. Over the last few years though, finding the time to hit the court has been extremely difficult. During my basketball downtime though, I got really into Street Fighter IV on a serious level. I began to really pay attention to the concepts behind the game and how to use them to my advantage.
This year, my life has really settled down and I now regularly play basketball again. While I’ve had to work hard to get back into game shape (I lost 20 lbs and counting since I started playing again in April), and I’ll never have the raw physical talent that I did in my prime, I do have something now that I didn’t have before: Street Fighter knowledge.
Oddly, I’ve been able to apply much of the thinking involved in playing Street Fighter into my thinking of basketball. Has it made me a better player? I think it has. I’m not saying that Kobe Bryant should dust off his E. Honda to get better, but having that parallel helps me see basketball in a different way, allowing me to play the game smarter. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to apply these concepts in a one-on-one basketball situation, because adding in more players will make this more difficult to explain than it should be. I have at least four parts to this series ready to go, with more possibly in the future.
I don’t need to set this up any more. Here is part one of Street Fighter concepts that made me a better basketball player.
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After my overall positive experience with FIFA World Cup 2010, I decided to give my favourite sport a shot. NBA Live for the iPhone and iPod Touch was also on sale for $0.99 when I picked it up. As someone who has generally nit-picked at games based on my favourite sport to the point that I quit playing them years ago, I thought that having a mobile version could be interesting. While I’ve had some fun with it, I’m not sure the game has enough to overcome it’s deficiencies.
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In Third Person 