FOX sports - NBA basketball 2000 Review
Being a sports game there is no story to this game. The object is to be the best basketball team in the league and win the season. So what does this game have to offer that others don't? Firstly all 29 roster teams from 99/00 season, real FOX Sports Announcers, Graphics and sounds, a rebound indicator to show you where to grab the board and a GO-To-Guy to get the ball passed to your teams best player during crucial parts of the match. Well at least that's what the box says anyway!
The Gameplay was quite smooth and it was quite easy to see what was going on. I could not get the block and steal keys to work because they are all controlled by the same button as the switch player key. So every time I wanted to block the player in front of me from getting to the rim I would press the block key and I would change to a different player. I don't know why the keys were programmed that way but it made defending difficult. Fortunately shooting is easy so defending was not so much an issue, they do say the best form of defence is attack! There were tons of different dunks though and as many camera angles you could think of to go with them. Three pointers were not quite so easy though. In other Basketball games I have played the shooting is controlled by the skill of the player making the shot. In this game you the user are the ones to control the shot so if you are poo at shooting you ain't gonna score much!
One thing I really didn't like about the game was that in the 4th quarter with about 1 minute left every time you get the ball the players on the other team will fowl you, this really destroys the fluent game play. It means that you get loads of free throws, which may be good if you are behind in points but thought it was a bad idea. You can get round this though by turning off fowls completely.
One of my fav bits was the create a player because you can create players with greatly exaggerated facial features like huge/tiny ears, eyes really wide apart/really close together, huge/tiny nose, no hair/loads of hair, big/small/wide/thin chin - You get the idea! I liked this because you could have funny looking people playing basketball, which brought an extra element of fun to a quite good game.
The commentary was quite good to start with but it got repetitive after a while. But that would be the same in any game. The game sounds were realistic like the ball bouncing on the court the squeaking of the player's shoes the sound of the dunking etc.
The graphics were good as well. The 3D-animation of the players was quite smooth and realistic and there were no blocky images, even the crowd looked realistic.
It is a basketball game, nothing amazingly new or special, seen it all before but it does make a good challenger to EA sports titles.