Last week marked the return of Sony's pro basketball franchise, which wasn't published last year because the developer took some time off from its yearly development cycle to reevaluate the game and its goals. The result of that time off is NBA 06: The Life Vol. 1, which is in reference to the new story-based gameplay mode that is the centerpiece of the game. The Life turned out to be an interesting, albeit flawed, feature--what with its heavily scripted progression that follows the story of an NBA rookie looking to get drafted so he can become a star. Unfortunately, holes in the core gameplay mechanics and the lack of a standard dynasty mode leave NBA 06 as more of a curiosity than a must-have for basketball fans.
Right from the start, the game encourages you to jump right into its unique story mode, as you're presented with just three options in the menu: NBA, The Life, and Online. NBA opens up options to play single exhibition games, to dip into NBA 06's extensive list of minigames, or to play season mode. If you start up The Life mode, it begins by putting you into a character-creation screen, where you'll be able to select your jersey number, as well as customize the appearance of your created baller by specifying his accessories, like headbands, elbow pads, leg sleeves, and, of course, tats.
The options here were surprisingly limited, compared to the player-creation abilities of similar games. We couldn't find any options, for example, to make a baller a southpaw. Perhaps more importantly, you're not given any options to customize the size of your player, or his position. You always play as a point guard in The Life. Since the storyline is so heavily scripted, it's understandable on some level why these limitations are placed on you. But the restrictions may be disappointing for someone looking for something more open-ended. Our dream of creating the second coming of Kurt Rambis for the Lakers, complete with mullet and ugly black glasses, was immediately squashed. Once you're done with creating your point guard, The Life begins in earnest, starting you off with some cutscenes that place you in some predraft workouts for whatever team you selected as your favorite in your profile. Eventually you get drafted by your favorite team and then begin the long journey that is your first year in the league.
In a nutshell, The Life is a series of minigame challenges (interspersed with cutscenes) that set the stage for your character and how he advances in his first season in the NBA. Over the course of the campaign, you'll follow along as your wide-eyed rookie, a little known junior college player, generates buzz leading into the NBA draft before getting selected early in the second round. You'll follow his first-season highs and lows of performing in crunch time, facing off against rival players, and just dealing with the pressures of being a pro baller on and off the court.
It all sounds interesting and fun on paper, like a basketball role-playing game, of sorts. The problem is that within the first half hour or so, you begin to see how The Life is largely a flawed experience in execution. Oftentimes you'll get stuck with a loading screen, you'll watch a brief 30-second or one-minute cutscene, and then you'll deal with another loading screen before your next task is assigned. Sometimes the cutscenes run one after another, but you need to sit through about an equal amount of loading-screen time for all the time you spend watching the story play out. The story itself might be a little overdramatized, but that's to be expected. (Think of it as an interactive He Got Game.) But the incessant load screens that only reward you with a small spoonful of a cutscene keep you from getting into any real flow with the story or with your character.
The predraft workouts you do are a thinly disguised tutorial, introducing you to the game's shooting, juking, and passing mechanics. From time to time you'll jump into scrimmages, where you're given certain conditions, like win the game, score X number of points, or gather Y number of steals and assists. These challenges are all pass-fail. Pass and your character gains some attribute points...and you get to proceed in the storyline. Do extremely well and you'll get bonus attribute points, as well as unlock special extras, like jerseys for use in exhibitions. As you get into the season, these bonus goals become "showtime goals," where you try to get your player to not only be effective, but also entertain--with no-look dishes and alley-oops. Fail the challenge, however, and you have to do the drill or the mission all over.
And therein lies the flaw: It's very possible to get stuck on certain challenges for a while, which can be very frustrating. Most players may actually spend a few hours grinding through the predraft workouts and summer league games before they actually reach the regular season, where more fun in The Life mode awaits. Even when you start getting to the more interesting parts of the story, though, the possible frustrations of getting stuck on a mission remain. Your team may win a game, for example, but you may end up an assist or a steal short of meeting the conditions of the challenge. So in effect, you've failed. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Whatever happened to "Just win, baby!"?
So how does NBA 06 fare just as a basketball game? It definitely has a few things going for it. One thing we found interesting was the game's "showtime" mechanic. Basically, it's a momentum meter that rewards players with temporary attribute increases depending on how you play. If you take the risk of using the game's no-look pass button to make plays, you'll be rewarded with bumps in both your showtime meter and your corresponding stat boosts. If you put too much mustard on the hot dog and sling the rock out of bounds, you take a hit to your showtime meter...and your players get nailed with attribute penalties. You can also affect the showtime meter in other ways. If you hog the ball with your star player, you'll get penalized. However, if you distribute the ball more evenly to earn assisted baskets, you'll get a small boost. It's interesting, but in practice, the showtime meter doesn't seem to affect gameplay in a very tangible way.
Over the course of a match, you won't find many safe opportunities to throw no-look passes, for example. Another interesting mechanic is the alley-oop. In other games, this usually involves waiting for the right moment and then just tapping the right button or a combination of right buttons. The rest is automatic. What's nice about NBA 06's alley-oop is that it brings precise timing in to the equation, just like throwing a real alley-oop pass. You hold down the R2 button to send a cutter to the basket, and then you tap on a pass button (either the regular pass or the no-look pass) to throw the ball to the cutter as he elevates to the hoop. If you don't time it just right, the pass sails awry. But get it down, and the result is a satisfying dunk. The color-coded shooting mechanic from the PSP version of the game is also here. You basically hold down the button and then release it to shoot the ball. But you must do so when the color wheel above your player turns green. Get it in the red or orange and it's likely you'll miss.
Unfortunately, NBA 06's gameplay failings outweigh its successes. Your players will have the uncanny ability to brick layups in even light traffic. Balls caroming off the rim get vacuumed to hands, and you'll also see computer players moving at light speed to pick up loose balls. The collisions have improved a lot since NBA Shootout 2004, as has the post game, but it can still be difficult to stay in front of computer ball handlers. And though it's relatively easy to block shots, the computer's shooting percentage doesn't seem to be negatively affected as much as it should if you get a hand in the shooter's face. We also noticed that your movement inputs will get strangely ignored from time to time. The most frequent example is when the computer throws the ball in to the post. We'll try to pinch down with a perimeter defender to bring a double-team, but sometimes the defender you're controlling will all of a sudden snap back to his man behind the three-point arc, as though he's attached by a bungee cable. No amount of slamming on the analog stick will bring him back over, so it's as though the computer is forcing you not to cheat off the outside shooter.
NBA 06 is also pretty ho-hum in the graphics and sound department. The cutscenes in The Life mode can be pretty pedestrian-looking, and the voice acting there is decent, though it's not particularly noteworthy. Perhaps most disturbing is that there's no play-by-play announcing at all when you're playing a standard game. The actual sound effects of dunks, swishes, and dribbling are good, but without any kind of play-by-play, it just seems like something's missing. Meanwhile, the game's hip-hop soundtrack provides some decent beats to nod your head to--if you're into that sort of thing. The in-game graphics are as uneven as the sound. While dunk and juke animations look really nice, players still seem to ice-skate over the floor. The player models could also have used a little more detail, and it can be difficult to tell who's who on the floor, what with the models looking so generically similar. The crowd graphics in the game are also quite bad, as they're completely flat and static.
Outside of The Life, NBA 06 does offer a season mode (complete with league-wide stat-tracking) and full general-management capability, but no dynasty or franchise mode is available. There are, however, a ton of minigames available for play both online and offline, ranging from playground games of 21 and two-on-two, to ballhandling, shooting, and defensive drills that are similar to the types of practices your high school coach used to set up. Online play in NBA 06 features the full suite of amenities that the Shootout series used to offer, like tournaments, leaderboards, message boards, and more. We did notice a bit of choppiness and input sluggishness when playing online, but it was nothing that led the game to be unplayable.
NBA 06 is a lot like a journeyman player who's looking to redefine himself. The Life mode is definitely pretty interesting. And with a little more flexibility and refinement, it could have been a really nice complementary gameplay mode, as well as an alternative to standard franchise modes. Even in its flawed state, it just might be worth checking out in the form of a rental--especially if you liked the 24/7 mode of the NBA 2K series, because The Life is similar, only it's more scripted and story-driven. Unfortunately, when it comes to the nuts and bolts of hoops, NBA 06 still lags behind other basketball games on the market, making it very difficult to recommend.
