HWhen playing a title like NBA Street Homecourt, it’s hard not to imagine you’re taking part in some metaphorical episode of Thunderbirds (stay with us, on this one). While the action on display is engaging and dramatic, at all times you can just make out the strings holding the whole show together. Though the thematically pinpointed music and home-video sepia effects may wow while they’re fresh, the fun tends to fade with each repeated new animation. Though the CPU going one up from downtown rather than just pulling level punishes slack play, you’re painfully aware that genuine skill on your part will result in the same reward. Though the sheer volume of acrobatic moves available to the player in possession is vast, they’re never used in any imaginative contexts. We could go on but, suffice to say, for every moment that’s finger-lickin’ good, there’s an equal and opposite irreparably arse-wipin’ bad.

The whole show kicks off promisingly enough. The overall ‘big idea’ needed to justify yet another biannual milking of the NBA cow, is to challenge a succession of the league’s biggest stars, back on the hometown courts on which they first rose to notoriety. The first step in all of this, bizarrely enough, is to create your own avatar using the genes of two current players, alongside a general guideline of skin tone and hair. Once your giant has emerged from the virtual cloning tank, it’s off to your own home court, complete with threadbare chain-link fence and run-down house frontages, ready to form a three-strong team, playground style. From here on in you’ll be challenged to a series of matches, some simply to grind your stats, others to earn access to further arenas, each sporting similarly tatty insignias. Said matches are divided into a handful of categories, including simple ‘first to X points’ face-offs, as well as ones where only certain types of score count, be they dunks, long-range efforts or Gamebreakers (about which there’s more later). That, friends, is a whole game summarised in a mere 200 words.

Yes, the whole experience refuses to assume any greater complexity than the completion of match after match, spiced up only by a stat-boosting apparel-purchasing system that might as well be an advertisement and the occasional chopping and changing of team members; a process that has all the emotional depth and charm of scribbling out a number then writing
down its replacement. As a result of all this, Homecourt soon becomes strictly multiplayer-only. While thegenuinely user-friendly difficulty curve of proceedings makes for accessible post-pub fare, there are still a few further problems. For starters, the Gamebreaker system (allowing players a chance to even things up by altering both scorelines) is somewhat open to abuse. Too small a number of tricks, successfully finished with a point or two, are needed to fill the power bar needed to activate the feature. As defence has become (understandably) more difficult to encourage stylish play, shorter matches can be effectively (and sometimes literally) won instantly, with players achieving Gamebreaker status at almost every dead ball. Again, while you will initially laugh at the absurdity of basketball players breakdancing around the ball to a musical slice of Eighties nostalgia, eventually it’ll hit home that you’re just tapping random directions and trick buttons, which are not all that involved in the mechanics of trying to beat your marker. Kind of takes the fun out of mocking your opponent’s bufoonery, that.

Some of the rules of the sport have been tampered with in too gung-ho a fashion, too. We remember spending many a happy our parked in front of our televisions, sinking basket after basket before NBA Showtime: NBA on NBC. Now, although the majority of ingame courts were ‘realistic’ and featured grandstands, ringside seats and the rest of it, this was no po-faced outing. You could play as a man with a giant gorilla’s head, for Pete’s sake. Amid all of this frivolity though, the game still employed the ‘goaltending’ rule (which essentially stops defenders from batting the ball out of the air on its way down towards the basket). In real life, this prevents scoring from anywhere other than directly under the basket becoming impossible, which itself prevents the sport becoming a stale dunk-fest. Here, there is no such regulation, making downtown shots incredibly hard and each match more of a risk-free precession. Again, not a strong part of the case against any one you happen to beat (“ha, ha – I pressed the two trick buttons more randomly than you did!”). You’re better off waiting for NBA Street Home And Away Court, or whatever name the sequel’s going to leap upon.

Dave Shaw