Konami's NBA Starting Five suffers from several serious problems, including poor AI that leads to some shoddy rebounding as well as all-around poor offensive and defensive games that don't even come close to anything offered by the competition. Shot percentages are also problematic, with some star players regularly missing jump shots from three feet away. The passing game could also use a little more work--nearly every pass is made to look as though it's out of control, and the receiving player has to struggle to get it.
Still, NBA Starting Five offers a basic franchise mode where you can take your team through dozens of NBA seasons. In the front-office portion of the mode, you can look at your current roster, trade up to three players at once, sign free agents, and, in the off-season, resign players. The trade and free-agent signing systems are based on a point system, and your team will have 1000 points to spend on players. Obviously a portion of this is already spent on your current roster, so you may have only 100 to 200 points left, which should be good enough to get a great player. At the end of the season, you'll enter into the draft where you can select from a list of rookies, but you'll only have access to an overall player rating as a means for deciding which rookie is the best. There isn't much more to the franchise mode, but if for some inexplicable reason you happen to purchase this game, it's the only other mode besides the standard exhibition and playoff options.
The gameplay in Starting Five is an absolute mess. First, the rebounding is so poor that players occasionally run away from the ball, and the rest of the time they just casually stroll over to a ball that has landed right in front of their faces. In some cases, the ball will fall down right in front of a player, and he will do absolutely nothing, though the computer's team seems to have no problem rebounding the ball with some sort of consistency. The post-up game completely lacks any sort of driving move, so you have to basically back down your opponent until you're right underneath the basket, but with this game's short percentages and the defense's knack for swatting balls on almost every trip down the court, you'd be lucky to hit that shot. Interestingly, you don't even really need to use a post-up maneuver because you can just walk the ball straight into the paint, move around the defenders a little, and then take a shot. This move is also useful because the refs are a little too liberal with the three-second violation, and the only way to get rid of that particular problem is to turn it off completely. Lastly, the passing game has seemingly been designed so that even the simplest pass looks like it's out of control, which becomes quite annoying because the defense has a much better chance of stealing the ball when this lame effect occurs.
Defensively, there are some nice tricks that you can use. When the opposing point guard brings the ball up to the half-court line and you start to play close defense, he'll essentially get trapped, stand there for several seconds, and then make a pass. There's also an incredibly worthless defensive move that seems to serve absolutely no purpose, where a player will stick his hand up into the air as if he's reaching for something on top of a shelf that's taller than he is.
Unfortunately, the gameplay is an indicator of what to expect from the graphics--something below what the competition offers. The player models in Starting Five don't look horrible, but some of them are just far too generic and don't even remotely look like their real-life counterparts. This problem is amplified by a similar problem found in other basketball games as well--that star players receive more treatment than the other players. But even then, some of the major players in the NBA aren't really represented all that well here.
Like nearly every other aspect of Starting Five, the commentary isn't anything special. The two-man commentary team chimes in with very basic and generic comments. There's also a problem with repetition--you'll hear the color commentator constantly repeat himself over the course of a single game. The two commentators also don't really interact, so the commentary is lacking any sort of natural flow.
Starting Five is a horrible train wreck of problems ranging from poor rebounding and passing to inconsistent shooting percentages and a worthless post-up game. Surprisingly, the game does offer a franchise mode, which should help extend the amount of torture involved in playing the game. There's absolutely no reason for you to even look at NBA Starting Five when the game does almost nothing well.
