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Sony’s NBA series provides another entertaining round of portable basketball. While Sony’s NBA series has struggled on the PS2 and PS3, largely due to extremely strong competition from EA Sports and 2K Sports, the series has done well on the PSP thanks to its inclusion of remarkably fun minigames. NBA 08 is no exemption.
NBA 08 is still fairly light on game modes. The game does include the expected exhibition and season modes, but lacks a franchise or dynasty mode. The franchise and dynasty modes are mainly responsible for the replay value in a lot of sports games so it hurts the game not to include one. However, as I mentioned above, the PSP version includes a lot of minigames, many of which are remarkably fun. NBA 08’s minigames are divided into “Mini-Games,” “All Star Weekend” and “Carnival,” all of which are loosely related to actual basketball. The included minigames include things like Own the Court, where you shoot from certain areas to gain control of that area, HORSE, and Conquest, where you compete against various rival teams to make your team even stronger. But there’s also non-basketball minigames like pinball and the incredibly fun Dodgeball, where you’re simply tasked with throwing balls at opposing players. All in all, Sony San Diego realized that the minigames are the real stars here and developed the game accordingly.
The gameplay is solid. NBA 08 still includes the colored-rings shooting of Sony’s NBA games. Basically, when you want to shoot you’ll see either a red, yellow or green halo around the ball. If it’s yellow, you have a decent shot of making it and if it’s green you have a fairly good chance. You need to time your shot to let go when the ring is green. The game also has the option to eliminate this for a simpler, hold-and-shoot mechanism. The rest of the offensive is fairly solid, although it’s still fairly hard to drive in for lay-aways or dunks.
The game includes a simple online mode. You can play one-on-one multiplayer games wireless via local or online multiplayer. Additionally, Sony is promising roster updates to be available via an online download. Technically, the game performs well online with very little lag.
NBA 08’s graphics are pretty good on the PSP. The player models look pretty good on their own but don’t always resemble their onscreen counterparts. The animations are okay, too, but not amazing and sometimes rather stiff. The game’s courts and arenas are serviceable, but lack things like 3D crowds. NBA 08 looks quite similar to its PS2 brother, making the game more visually impressive on the small portable than Sony’s console.
The game’s audio performs respectfully. The sounds of basketball are faithfully recreated in the game. The soundtrack is made up of the typical basketball mix of rock and rap, which sounds just fine. The commentary is fairly solid and accurate, although the banter isn’t great.
NBA 08 succeeds on the PSP for three primary reasons. The somewhat shallow gameplay feels fine on the portable, the inclusion of minigames make short play sessions quite fun and the series is only competing against one other series (NBA Live), which is going through some growing pains on the platform. NBA 08 on PSP is definitely the best of the three NBA 08 games, and a good basketball game to boot. -- Jose Liz, PGNx Media
---- Oct 3, 2007
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