NBA 2K6 Hands-on

Developer Interview

In this interview Rob Jones explains some of the improvements being made to NBA 2K6.

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We had an opportunity to get hands-on with an early build of 2K Sports' upcoming basketball sim, NBA 2K6, at a recent press event. We were quite surprised by the number of changes being made to both the game logic and the core mechanics. When you put them all together, NBA 2K6 may end up being the biggest face-lift the franchise has seen in years.

The most significant and noticeable change is that shots are now mapped to the right analog stick, which is now aptly named the "shot stick." Most basketball games have one or two shot buttons, and when you press a button, the game simply picks what it thinks is the best possible shot for the situation. The shot stick promises to give you the flexibility to choose which shots to take to fit a given context. The most basic use of the shot stick is for jump shots. Pull back on the stick to start the motion, then release when your player has the ball at the apex of his jump. It sounds like a natural motion, analogous to popping a jumper in real life, but it may take some getting used to. The shot stick starts to make more sense in the case of driving layups and dunks. As you make your drive to the basket, sometimes a big man will step into your lane, getting in between you and the hoop. By tapping left or right on the shot stick, you can force your player to lean to either side and attempt to shoot around the defender, much as you would do in real life. If you think you have an elevation advantage on the defender, you can instead press up on the stick to try to go straight over the top with the layup. If this sounds too scary, don't worry. The shot button is still there, like a security blanket for those who prefer to let the computer call the shots.

So if the right stick is mapped to shots, what happened to isomotion juke moves? Before we explain that, we should mention that the standard turbo button as you know it has been scrapped altogether in NBA 2K6. In its place is the "aggressive button." What's the difference? Instead of giving you a speed boost and draining an energy meter like a standard turbo button, the aggressive button merely acts as a modifier. Hold it down while going for a driving layup, and that layup becomes a dunk attempt instead. Need something fancier than just a basic chest pass? Hold down aggressive while hitting that pass button. Want to challenge a shot but not risk a shooting foul? Just press the block button. But if you want to make that block attempt a Ben Wallace-esque volleyball spike, that's when you engage the aggressive button with the block button.

That brings us back to isomotion, which has now moved over to the left analog stick. When you combine the aggressive button with the left analog stick, your basic dribbles and motion across the court become more forceful jukes and fancy dribble moves. The moves you do with the stick are now more closely tied to what happens on the screen than past iterations of isomotion, which seemed to unleash canned animations as you tapped the analog stick. Now if you sway back and forth with the stick, you'll cross the ball over in front of you. Hesitation dribbles are possible by jabbing to the same side as your ball hand. You can also execute 360s, wraparounds, and more. Want to do a half spin, then spin back around in the same direction? You can do that. It's all context sensitive and dependent on which hand the ball is in. The best part of it all? If you control a skilled-enough ball handler, you can easily chain a few of these moves together, then flick the right analog stick to cap everything off with a layup or dunk attempt. In our brief hands-on time with the game, it didn't take us long before we were able to chain together several dribble moves to break down defenders. Of course, it'll probably take a considerable amount of time to master the mechanic and get beyond just mashing the stick around in the heat of an intense game.

The passing game promises much improvement over last year's game. There will now be two distinct pass buttons in NBA 2K6. The regular pass button will throw the ball to where the recipient is standing, as in every other basketball game on the market. The second button is your lead pass button, and that will lead the receiver toward the basket. As you can imagine, throwing an alley-oop is done by holding down aggressive plus the lead pass. As it currently stands, the lead pass button feels quite powerful. You can drive to the basket, recognize a teammate with an open lane, and hit him with the ball as he's already moving toward the hole. This gives the computer-controlled defense much less time to react and lets you take better advantage of dump-off opportunities close to the basket as the defense collapses.