NBA Shootout 2004

While it lacks a traditional Franchise mode, NBA Shootout 2004 does offer plenty of gameplay types. A full season is here, with the usual trimmings, as well as the return of the Career mode from last year, which was the lone bright spot. Within, you tryout for a team and spend time in the NBDL (the minor leagues, effectively, of the NBA), until you earn a crack at the big time. It plays out very RPG-esque, and is a lot of fun to build up a custom player and make them a centerpiece of a successful team. New to the mix is the 50 Greatest Players quest - perform certain feats in certain situations, and you unlock one of the 50 greatest players in league history - most of them, anyhow. With a bunch of them still active (including Scottie Pippen, Shaq, and Karl Malone), not all are unlockable, and Michael Jordan is nowhere to be found, you can still get many past greats like Walton, Chamberlain, and Bird and put them on your team.

It's rounded off by ridiculously well-designed online mechanics for multiplayer action. Not only does Shootout '04 support the USB headset in broadband games, and offers dial-up action as well, but the whole experience is built around spending lots of time in 989's service. While you look around for games, or download roster updates, you can get a check of sports scores from the real leagues, across all the sports. It might seem unimportant, but when you're wasting time playing online games, it's a cool option to be able to see the scores for your team while you're on the network. This is the kind of stuff that sets the tone that 989 and Sony really want you online, and while Shootout probably won't ever come close to having as many users as NBA Live has, it's something to build on as a drawing card when they're able to tweak the game to really give EA and Sega a run for their money.

On the court is where Shootout has taken its biggest strides, however. Last year, the game was plodding with awkward, sluggish controls and a general lack of excitement, which made for a very disappointing experience. This year, 989 tweaked it all, and made a game that maintains a very nice pace of play, with solid controls and a much smoother feel overall. There's nothing here that's not been done in other basketball games, but what 989 has presented is playable and fun, which is the best first positive step if you're going to make a great hoops game. Once you get that down, the other stuff can come, so I'm hopeful that Shootout 2005 will improve on it and break through to give EA and Sega that necessary competition.

It's not perfect, obviously. On defense it's a little too easy to steal the ball and block all the shots, and on offense, shots go down a bit too easy, even on higher difficulty settings. Plus, it's not hard to slice down the lane and lay down a dunk without much defensive effort from an opponent, human or not - since a human can't be everywhere, y'know. What it creates is very high scoring games, which can be pretty exciting, but not totally realistic. The AI is suspect, most especially at the medium level, which is closer to easy than hard, instead of creating a good balance. Granted, that will vary from player to player, but definitely, medium isn't particularly challenging, it just requires the abuse of the AI flaws a big more to win.

But there's no arguing that Shootout 2004 is a vast improvement - this game reminds me a lot of the original Shootout on PlayStation, which was a bit awkward in its debut, but evolved into a fine hoops franchise in that era. The different options of play provide for reasons to play, despite the small gameplay flaws, which are dealt with easily because, well, 90% of basketball games struggle to get the blocking/stealing/ease of driving the lane thing down pat. It's definitely not worth buying over NBA Live 2004 or ESPN NBA Basketball, but if you're looking for a decent secondary game to toy around with, Shootout is definitely not bad, and definitely not an embarrassment. It's playable, and fun, and that accounts for something. And with such great online play and options, it's bound to attract some form of audience looking to play hoops online.

The engine for Shootout is all new this year, and the graphics show marked improvement - albeit not in the same range as the competition, but good enough. Player models are nice, and have a good assortment of animations and move smoothly, and the frame rate is solid and fast, failing to break down under pressure and ride the choppy seas. The courts look nice and the crowd is decent - it's respectable. But, a lot of things are on the bland side; good enough to look nice, but after seeing games like NBA Live and NCAA March Madness, it only manages to look decent rather than something special. Still, there's something to build upon, and hopefully next year the game will continue to improve here and look more like a PS2 game instead of a 1^st generation Dreamcast one.