College Hoops 2K6 Hands-On

It's long been said that the NBA is a me-first take on basketball, while NCAA college basketball is more of a traditional form of the sport--a hearkening back to the days when teammates were, you know, friendly, and people passed the ball a bit. For the past few years, the development team at 2K Sports has been honing in on defining the collegiate game as a separate entity from its NBA big brother, and its most recent attempt, College Hoops 2K6, further explores this territory. We got an updated hands-on look at the game, just a scant few weeks before the real NCAA season begins.

While the NBA game is more about the superstars that dominate the course, it seems like the 2K folks are putting more of an emphasis on the guy who stands on the sidelines the entire game in 2K6: the head coach. In addition to featuring a host of real basketball head coaches in the game (2K6 game producers estimate they have roughly 85 percent of the currently active NCAA basketball coaches), the attributes of your created legacy mode coach will have a more active effect on your players' progressions than ever before.

Two coach attributes in particular--charisma and discipline--have tangible effects on your players, thanks to some expanded player attributes, such as focus and confidence. For example, as a player moves throughout a season, his focus and confidence will ebb and flow depending on factors such as playing time. If the player feels like he's not getting enough minutes, he might let you know about it. From there you'll have a few options. First, you can answer his request by giving him what he wants: more time on the hardwood. Barring that, you can call your player in for a pep talk to give him an immediate boost. Be warned, however, that you can only use 10 pep talks in a single season, so you'll likely want to save them for big games, not for when your whiny freshman walk-on shooting guard is acting petulant.

As a coach, your efficiency in attributes such as charisma and discipline will dictate how much success you'll have helping your player out with his confidence and focus attributes, respectively. In turn, once that player takes the hard court, the difference between a confident and focused player and a meek, sulking boy will be marked and obvious. So you'll likely have considerably more success with the former making plays.

Other coach-centric options during a game are the coach's clipboard, which is a quick and easy way to access your tactics during time-outs. Instead of pausing the game to cycle through menus to get to your defensive and offensive sets, the coach's clipboard pops up automatically so you can make adjustments right there. One aspect in particular, known as "points of emphasis," are of special importance in the game. They cover four specific areas of your game: ball control, rebounding, defense, and shot selection. Choosing one of these points of emphasis will give your team a boost in its relative attribute. Choose "ball control," for example, and your team will be less apt to turn the ball over. Once again, your created coach's ratings will affect the amount of boost granted to your team during these coaching sessions. If your coach has a high offensive rating, you'll have greater success choosing "shot selection" as a point of emphasis than you might if you chose "rebounding," for example.

The off-the-court activities in 2K6 will be deeper as well, thanks to some new recruiting twists that look to improve on last year's legacy mode. Recruiting, of course, is probably the most important job of every coach in the NCAA, but the amount of information that a player must deal with in many collegiate sports games when recruiting can be overwhelming. In College Hoops 2K6, the developer has sought to make things easier on the player by including a target list that will let you track up to 15 players you hope to recruit to your team. This list of 15 can include any combination of talent, including, perhaps, a handful of "sure things" for when you're just starting out; a couple of ambitious picks (hey, you might get lucky); and even a few five-star "dream signings" (for when the stars align perfectly). As you progress through your season, you'll be able to keep tabs on each of these recruits' interest levels, and you can make adjustments accordingly.

The idea, according to the 2K folks, is to give the player more options when recruiting. If you're a total control freak, you can closely monitor each recruit in your lineup from week to week to see how the prospects for signing him shape up. If you prefer to be more hands-off during some points of the season--you know, so you can prepare for the games happening right now--the producers said they strove to make sure the recruiting artificial intelligence (in the form of your hired assistant coaches, whom you can assign to automatically keep up recruiting chores) will make smart recruiting decisions from week to week based on the priorities on your target list. Considering you can now begin recruiting players as young as high school freshmen, 2K6 gives you the kind of hands-off control that should be an important factor in helping you consistently keep up the recruiting pressure.

Camp Value

Another new twist on the recruiting trail comes with the introduction of training camps that the players on your target list will be entering. There are three camps to choose from: elite, advanced, and intermediate. And only the best players in the land will be attending the advanced and elite camps, so as you start out in 2K6's legacy mode, you'll likely want to hit the intermediate camp to follow the players on your list. Camp activities come in two flavors: scrimmage games where you can see the player in action in five-on-five situations and a huge number of drills that will give you a more focused look at some of a player's abilities. Two drills we checked out were the fast break and the knockout ones. The fast break drill puts you in a three-on-two situation on both offense and defense while knockout has your player standing in line while waiting his turn to shoot a basket. Make it and you knock out the player behind you in line--with the ultimate goal of being the last man standing. There are many more drills to check out, and as such, the entire camp feature looks to bring a different flavor to the legacy mode.

As you make your way through a 40-year career in legacy mode, you'll be racking up legacy points, which will provide a gauge for your success as a virtual coach. A coach with lots of wins will earn a certain amount of legacy points, while a coach with lots of quality wins and tournament victories will likely do even better. Other factors worked into legacy points include how quickly you nab a number one recruit, how quickly your player's progress, and so on. At the end of your career, your legacy points total will be a nice indicator of your success as a coach, not to mention great for bragging rights against your buddies.

In terms of control and tempo, 2K6 feels similar to last year's game. This is a college game, after all, and the pace at some points can be remarkably slower than what you might be used to from the pros. Dual player control returns, and the shot stick and strip-and-rip system make appearances from NBA 2K6. Even the 2K6 free-throw system is like in the NBA game. The aggressive modifier system, executed with the trigger and face buttons, lets you pull off dramatic offensive moves, such as dunks and alley-oops. The streamlined substitution system lets you call for quick substitutions by holding down the triggers during dead-ball fouls without having to back out to a pause menu to make adjustments. You can even make specific zone adjustments in any of the game's 10 half-court and three full-court zone sets with an easy-to-use menu system.

Presentation-wise, 2K6 has had to make some dramatic shifts since the loss of the ESPN license. The fruits of its labor come in the form of broadcast-style programming that shows up at specific times in a legacy mode season, such as a preseason show (which showcases the top 25 teams in the nation, as well as the prospective first and second team all-Americans) and, later on in the year, a Selection Sunday show that will give you all the scoop on who made it in to the Big Dance, and who just missed the cut. These broadcast-style shows are hosted by CBS personalities Greg Gumbel and Clark Kellogg (while game commentary duties are shared by Verne Lundquist, Bill Raftery, and Bonnie Bernstein). The commentary in the shows has a nice sense of flow to it, providing you pretty insightful information on practically every team discussed on the show. Finally, in a sport where authenticity counts so much, it's nice to know that there are no fictional teams in 2K6. In fact, a number of new schools have been added to the list this time around--including teams such as North Dakota State, South Dakota State, Kennesaw State, and North Florida.

With tournaments being such a huge part of the college hoops scene, 2K6 looks to up the ante on real-life tourneys in its game. Authentic basketball tournaments, such as the BCA Classic, the Preseason NIT, BP Top of the World Classic, Pepsi Blue & Gold Classic, the Great Alaska Shootout, and more, will all be found in the game, and we've even heard word of an online Pontiac tournament hosted by 2K sometime in early 2006. More details on that to come, so stay tuned.

We've only had a few hours to check out 2K6 so far, but we like what we've seen of it. Though next-generation pro basketball seems to be at the forefront of many folks' minds these days, there's still plenty of good college hoops to be found on the "old" consoles. We'll have more on College Hoops 2K6, including a full review of the game, when it's released in November.