NBA Street Impressions

As part of the PlayStation Portable presentation at Sony’s annual pre-E3 press conference, Electronic Arts unveiled plans to bring its popular arcade basketball series, NBA Street, to the PSP.

While details on any of the PSP games shown at the press conference are hard to come by at the moment, EA did show off a brief video of its upcoming games in action. The games shown in the clips were running on early, prototype emulators based on Sony’s specs and might not be representative of the system’s final performance.

That said, the demo looked really impressive. NBA Street’s models looked quite slick--perhaps not as smooth as its PlayStation 2 counterpart, but the models looked smoother than a PlayStation 1 game, and the game’s frame rate and speed moved very smoothly. Not a ton of gameplay was shown, but there were certainly some of the high-flying dunks and moves players have come to expect from the series.

So will the final product come out looking as strong as the brief demo shown at the press conference? We’ll have to wait and see. NBA Street is currently scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2005.