Everyone in the mobile games industry has had their eye on Digital Chocolate, game entrepreneur Trip Hawkins' new "mobile lifestyles" company. Thus far, DChoc's design ethos for sports games has been to try to maximize the mobile platform's advantages as a gaming machine, while minimizing or working around its many weaknesses--often by simply stripping out entire segments of gameplay, like the fielding and baserunning in Baseball Heroes. NCAA Hoops 2005, DChoc's new basketball game, walks a similarly fine line between playability and oversimplification. This game offers a very impressionistic (and sometimes frustratingly obtuse) take on basketball, but it captures enough of the essence of the sport, and includes enough online features, to be a fun play.
NCAA Hoops 2005 is a three-on-three basketball game that lets you choose from nearly 60 of the most popular college teams. Each team has a rating from one to five depending upon the strengths of its three players--point guard, small forward, and power forward. True to the form of most NCAA-licensed video games, none of the players have names, but they do have markedly different skill sets: Each player has been assigned a score from one to nine in four categories--outside shot, inside shot, passing ability, and defensive ability. All of these numbers bear upon their ability to perform in games and also give you an idea of how you should set up your team's offensive and defensive strategies. That's right--you can actually choose how each of your players plays offense and defense, both to suit your team's strengths and to counter the other team's likely strategy. For instance, if your opponent's PG can shoot the lights out, you can order your pointman to play tight defense and make your other two guys sag off a little to protect against the pass. You can adjust your strategies in the middle of a game, too.
This level of granularity in player skills and tactics is essentially unmatched in mobile basketball games. On the other hand, most of NCAA's competitors let you control the action to a greater degree. The basketball gameplay in NCAA has been greatly simplified, and a lot of the remainder is automated. Rebounding, which most basketball fans consider an integral part of the game, has been dispensed with entirely. The teams simply alternate shots whether they make a basket or not, so offensive rebounding and transition play are impossible. Also, you have no direct control over where your players run, dribble, or defend on the court. The game's artificial intelligence dictates these actions depending on how you've set your strategy. Therefore, the actual real-time gameplay is reduced to a handful of options: on offense, you can pass, throw fakes, toss alley-oops, and shoot; on defense, you can block shots and choose which opposing player to double-team.
NCAA Hoops 2005's system actually does a pretty good job of capturing the pacing of a basketball game, although some advanced players will be put off by the lack of control. One serious annoyance is the automated defense--your players will always try to double-team the ball handler, even though they'll often leave a forward wide open near the basket. There's no way to call a man-to-man defense, although you can compensate somewhat by switching quickly and playing a saggy zone. Also, the shot-blocking dynamic is totally unrealistic. You can basically block a shot 100 percent of the time, provided you are standing in front of the shooter in time to hit the jump button. Finally, the game demonstrated some unfortunate stability issues when we played it. We received a preloaded Motorola V400 from DChoc for testing purposes, and the game hard-crashed the phone twice, necessitating the removal of the battery.
In the plus column, NCAA Hoops' roster of options will surely please college hoops fans. You can set up quick games or play a 10-game season, which culminates in an NCAA Tournament, complete with a seeding system. There are also four difficulty levels--enough to cover pretty much any player. The game also taps in to DChoc's Mobile League server to deliver a very robust online scoreboard capability. Each played game affords you a certain number of "chips" based on your overall performance. These and other in-game statistics are auto-uploaded to Mobile League, which ranks NCAA players in a ton of different ways. Mobile League even keeps track of which team has earned the most chips nationally.
NCAA Hoops 2005's presentation is at least as competent as that of other mobile games in the genre, although the game doesn't exactly leap off the screen. The player sprites are small, but the action moves very fluently, and you can always tell what's going on; plus, the scoreboard and other important information are readily accessible. It's a shame that every game appears to take place on the same static half-court--some additional graphics or animations would have been a nice touch. There's plenty of sound in the game, from an opening ditty to several digitized sound effects. The effects are on the scratchy side, though, so they begin to wear quickly. You'll probably find yourself playing with the sound off in an hour or two.
In all, NCAA Hoops 2005 plays like a strange combination of a management simulation, a three-point shooting game, and a regular basketball game. In other words, it's an entirely unique take on mobile basketball, and, despite its unfamiliar mechanics, it's a generally enjoyable one. Inexperienced mobile gamers will appreciate its facilitated gameplay, and hardcore gamers may warm to the tactical aspects of the game. NCAA Hoops 2005 isn't a clean swish, but it's worth a download.
