Topic: NBA Street V3 w/ Mario Allstars!

[K-RPG]

EA sports has taken quite a dive in quality over the past year or so. Every major EA sports title has failed to upgrade there product significantly enough to make heads turn, like they have in the past. Has EA Sports Big followed there bigger brother into mediocrity?

Short answer? No.

V3 boasts a great many things. These things include; Amazingly unrealistic air-time, excellent character creation, a relatively deep "Street Challenge" mode and even Mario, Luigi and Peach as the Mario AllStars. The addition of "The Trick Stick" allows you to toggle through some over the top, Globe-Trotter esque tricks with the swiftest of ease. "The Game Breaker" will allow you to not only increase your score substancially, but decrease your opponents - with amazingly unique moves that arent even close to physically possible.

In the Street Challenge mode (Basically Career mode), you start by creating a character, a team, a court and a rep. You start by playing other shmo's on your way up to NBA Street allstar. Facing countless teams in games of 3 on 3 with the occasional sckewed rule in an attempt to earn "Rep" to increase you and your teams talent.

Visually, NBA Street Delivers with a variety of well designed character models, some nice blur and "Game Breaker" affects. The subtle saturation of colors definately helps V3 stand above, not only it's previous titles - but it's clones as well.

Audio wise, its very well done. A wide sound-track featuring variety of new and experianced musicians, and a few original tunes will give you something enjoyable to listen to, whilst your breakin' rims. The notable addition of (and believe me, I never thought this'd ever be a positive) the "Beastie Boys" as both the artist's of the theme song and playable characters will keep you wondering what else EA's got up there sleeves. The announcer is relatively funny, and legitimately sounds like he's watching the game.

Oh, its not all good people. The one main issue that I came across after my time with NBA Street V3, was the eventual loss of intrest in playing games. The arbitrary "3 on 3 to 21" is the gameplay mode you'll be forced to play most often, and the other modes, at least in story, are just minor alterations to said mode. For instance, you'll be asked to score 12 points in dunks, or the game will go up to 30, or points will be doubled - nothing substancial is done differently. At least not from where I see it.

Overall

NBA Street V3 is definately my favorite B-Ball title in a long while. Despite some monotony in the actual gameplay, it's still has a unique-ness that you wont be able to find in any Sim game.

Graphics - 18/20
Gameplay - 15/20
Audio - 19/20
Unique-ness - 20/20
Multi-Player - 16/20

Overall - 88/100

[couchmonkey]

How do you feel about the Mario all-stars?  Good, bad or meh?

[K-RPG]

The Mario All-Stars all have there specific talents;

Luigi dunks better than, well, almost everyone. He's rated higher in that catagory than Vince Carter.
Mario is balanced. He can dunk, shoot and play defence.
Peach is good with free-throws and 3 pointers.

The only problem I had with using them, is the fact that they're incredibly easy to block.  

[KnowsNothing]

Using the Mario All-Stars is just annoying in my opinion.  They're a pretty solid team, but they're not very easy on the eyes.  If you thought it'd look cool for Mario to be all "off the footay" and stuff then you'll be let down; he's way too small.  Mario's flaws are particularly evident in the dunk constest, where you get a close up of Mario's underwhelming stunts, robotic movements, and clipping problems with his head and the basket....

As opposed to PGC's review, I was disappointed by the lack of depth in every category of this game.  On the court there's no control of your teamates in any way, so trying to set up cool stunts can often be curse-indusing because all your teamate does is run back and forth.  The "career" mode is basically playing exhibition matches over and over again until you start using the game disk as a coaster.  There's some variation that's cool at first, but it gets old quickly.  The "Create a..." modes are pretty fun at first, but annoying after a while.  It takes a second or two to load the sample pics (result of lazy porting, probably) which makes scrolling through the many options very tedious.  The only part of the whole customation scene that I really liked was the court creator, which totally surprised me by actually being pretty fun =p

Also, this is one of the only games where I actually needed to look at the game manual for clearification.  Unfortunatley, the one that comes with the games is about four pages long and barely even makes an attempt to explain the game.  There's no effort in-game either., so you'll have to figure everything out on your own

I point out only the flaws though.  The multiplayer, though simplistic to the max, is rather enjoyable.  The game as a whole gets stale rather quickly, but when played in short burts it's pretty darn fun.  7.5/10

Fox College Hoops '99 is still the best basketball game I've ever played.  It was a thousand times the sum of its parts.