NBA Street also features a “Create a Baller” mode in which you create your own character to play as. As the players' team defeats each NBA team, the player can either choose an NBA player from the team they just beat, or opt to take 'development points' to make their created player better.

It’s been a decade and a half since Electronic Arts released NBA Street Vol. 2, the last truly great basketball video game. Even 15 years later, the game’s sense of style and spirit (and not to mention its soundtrack) have never been matched. Sure, new technology has granted us games like NBA 2K and its hyper-realistic graphics and gameplay—but realism was never the point of Street Vol. It framed basketball not simply as a sport played in identical, sanitized arenas across the country, but as a vital civic institution with its own history, music, and sense of place. It paid homage to basketball as spectacle, as art, as cultural lynchpin.It was also fun as hell.The gameplay was fluid, dynamic, fast-paced—each game a 3-on-3 sprint to 21 points by 1s and 2s at streetball courts located around the United States. 2 did not seek to faithfully capture regulation basketball, but rather the everyday soul of the sport.

There was no fouling, no out of bounds. (There was goaltending.) When you went to dunk, your player was temporarily subject to lunar gravity, and he glided to the rim like a ballerina, like Jumpman. It was the sounds of the game that truly animated each moment, not only the grunts of the players and jangle of the ball slicing through steel net but the noises that came from beyond the court. A handful of onlookers aahed and oohed in earnest from the sideline.

Choice cuts of ‘90s and early ‘00s hip hop—Dilated Peoples, MC Lyte, Erick Sermon and Redman, a custom pack of Just Blaze beats—blasted at block party levels. Real-life streetball emcee Bobbito Garcia a.k.a. DJ Cucumber Slice served as one-man commentary team/hype man, and he strained to be heard above the din, extolling every block (“Protect the nest!”), steal (“Oh, he boofed it on you, money!”), and handle (“Do you need a straw with that shake?”). The gentle learning curve and responsive touch of the controller forgave novices. 2 did not believe in delayed gratification; it took little practice to be able to cross up your opposition halfway to Guatemala or posterize him like. The game incentivized you to drive to the hole and acrobatically soar to the hoop, to make use of the dozens of tricks and dunks at your disposal, with the prospect of accumulating enough trick points to serve your adversary a soul-crushing Gamebreaker. When you triggered a Gamebreaker, you were no longer an actor but a spectator having an out-of-body experience, bearing witness to your own legend unfolding in real-time.

Instant nostalgia—that was Vol. 2 in a nutshell. The past isn’t over. It isn’t even past. Electronic ArtsNBA Street Vol.

2 was created over the course of two years at EA’s Vancouver campus by a team led by producer Wil Mozell. A veteran of five NBA Live games and a holdover from the first NBA Street team that had since dispersed, Mozell embraced the blank slate by building a team of individuals largely unfamiliar with the formula and legacy of sports video game production. Some had never worked on any video game before; Mozell’s search for a new art director led him to Kirk Gibbons, a “zen master” who had once won national championships with the UC-Santa Barbara surfing team and had developed several digital basketball products for Nike. The members of the Vol.

2 team set about diligently educating themselves on the history of streetball and hip hop; they pored over books, documentaries, and AND1 mixtapes and visited New York City’s most venerated streetball courts. “I was really into Jadakiss and Nas at the time,” said Gibbons. “I kind of joke that I’m a method art director, I was just listening to hip hop non-stop when I was making that game.”Inspiration struck early in the form of the, a two-and-a-half-minute spot that first aired during the 2001 NBA All-Star Game.

In the commercial, anonymous streetballers and NBA standouts like Lamar Odom, Jason Williams, and Baron Davis take turns dancing and working the ball like a yo-yo in the spotlight of an otherwise pitch-black arena.“We were blown away with how the creative direction was all about skills and moves of the players,” Mozell said. “No voice over, no special effects, no acting. Just raw basketball and streetball talent. This was the live version of our game. We wanted the moves in our game to speak for themselves, for the gamer to see them, feel them, and just be in awe of the talent on display. We wanted to talk to whomever was responsible for being able to capture the essence of such skill and talent.”With the help of EA Canada’s Director of Marketing Glenn Chin, Mozell tracked down the mastermind behind the Nike Freestyle commercial: Jimmy Smith, a creative director at the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy.

Mozell extended him an invitation to work on Vol. 2. Download jurassic park builder pc. “I remember when he called,” Smith said. “I’m like, ‘You want me to do the advertising?’ And he was like, ‘No! I want you to help us develop the actual video game!’ And I’m like, ‘Dude. I’m a pinball guy. My sons play, but I’m pinball.’ And he said, ‘No man, we want the culture. We want all of that that you infuse into Nike’s work.

We want that infused into the actual video game. We want it to be authentic.’ And I said, ‘Well, I can do that. I can do that all day long.’”. DJ Bobbito Garcia during Cucumber Slice Party August 11, 2003 at APT in New York City, New York, United States. (Photo by Johnny Nunez/WireImage) Johnny NunezSmith had worked on Nike’s streetball-based ad campaigns for the better part of a decade. 2 gave him an opportunity to apply his streetball knowhow to video games, a medium broader than advertising, and through the process of “collabsporation” he helped select and develop the game’s music, courts, and coterie of fictional streetballers.

But easily his biggest contribution was hiring the voice of the game: Bobbito Garcia.“Bobbito is a legend,” Smith said.Having worked on dozens of Nike commercials since the mid-’90s, Garcia` flew out to the EA campus for a marathon recording session. “They booked me, I got up to Vancouver, stayed an entire week, and they gave me like pages and pages of script,” Garcia recalled. “ Pages and pages of script. And I looked at them and I told them, I was like, ‘Yo, I have to be allowed to ad-lib here, because this is not how we talk.’ They were like, ‘Yeah, no leash, freak the fuck out.’”Garcia was a man uniquely positioned at the intersection of hip hop and streetball, a DJ and baller himself who co-hosted the famous hip hop radio show Stretch and Bobbito and had been announcing streetball games in New York since 1982.“I would be in the booth for eight hours, five days in a row, just screaming at the top of my lungs,” he said. “It was a hit in the first 15 minutes, because the dudes were in there laughing.

I was just coming up with stupid shit, like, ‘IT’S A PIZZA SLICE WITH NO CRUST!’ Like, just anything, because their whole shit was, ‘Yo, people play this hours and hours and hours, we have to come up with 40 different ways to say the word ‘dunk.’ Because otherwise it’s gonna be repetitive.’ I’m like, ‘There’s only so many ways to say ‘Oh my god, from deep!’ So I added some Spanish, I added some imagination, I added some authentic New York lingo.”. Occasionally, they would step outside to play a game of HORSE, and Bobbito the walking streetball encyclopedia helped the Vol. 2 team identify the names and significance of various moves and regaled them with stories from the streetball canon and from his own experiences.“Bobbito introduced a lot of the culture and the slang and just the way it works,” Myhill said.

“The guy has just got endless crazy stories. The stories weren’t always about streetball, they were about the players and just about the culture and what it’s like living in part of these places. And that really helped us get our head around it.

Like, I remember him telling us this one story about this one player who had just bought these new kicks—they were like totally brand new, spotless. And then, he was on a subway and the subway went down, and they had to get everybody out, and the guy had to walk down the tracks, and then his kicks got a little bit dirty, and he never wore them again. Because they had to be fucking perfect.”“Essentially, they just wanted to bring some more authenticity to the game,” Garcia said of his role in the game. “No knock on EA, but they’re based in Vancouver. Which has a wonderful playground basketball community, but the writers of Vol. 2 were all, like, hockey players. And I’m not even making that up.”.

The Influence of Dr. FunkSmith and Garcia’s perspectives helped the guys in Vancouver flesh out the essential identity of NBA Street Vol. 2: it collapsed the timeline of basketball, allowing modern NBA stars to square up against old-school legends on the blacktop. But just as important: it challenged the NBA’s supremacy by positing the streetball court as a great equalizer indifferent to designations like “professional” and “amateur.”In this sense, the game took many of its cues from a three-part 2001 Nike campaign that Smith had been involved in. One particularly immaculate 60-second Dr.

Funk spot takes place in 1975 during the waning seconds of a game at Rucker Park. The crowd clamors for Dr. Funk” Carter steps onto the court and the crowd goes wild. Bobbito Garcia, standing courtside, offers breathless play-by-play as Harlem basketball legend-cum-druglord Pee Wee Kirkland lobs Dr. Funk the ball for a windmill alley-oop at the buzzer to give the Uptowners the victory. Cue Bootsy Collins.

“I think Nike Freestyle captured the core gameplay experience we wanted the gamer to have. Moves that blew you away, yet seemed so simple to execute and would entertain over and over,” Mozell said. Funk is definitely more of the cultural vibe and visceral experience we wanted our audience to be immersed in. In one way, it was about combining the magic and awe of the athlete with an experience that was unique to only a few places on the planet, like Rucker Park.”Dr. Funk underscores the ways in which Vol.

2 bought into New York’s reputation as an outdoor hoops mecca and brought into the fold the mythical elements of New York’s rich streetball history, of the Rucker, the wellspring from which legends are born, of oral histories and eyewitness accounts from the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s that blur the line between fable and fact. The physics of Vol. 2 recall the superhuman feats of New York’s streetball kings of yore, like Earl “The Goat” Manigault, who could (supposedly) retrieve a dollar bill from the top of the backboard and leave behind a stack of coins; like Herman “Helicopter” Knowings, who could (supposedly) execute a 720-degree flush from the top of the key; like Joe “The Destroyer” Hammond, who (actually) put up 50 on Julius Erving in one half at Rucker. “The success of the first NBA Street gave us credibility and freedom to do something relevant and impactful with the soundtrack,” Mozell explained. “By the time Vol.

2 was getting ready to come out, the NBA was finally warming up to having hip hop in a video game they were affiliated with.”Mozell and Smith led the curation effort for a 10-track soundtrack that would ultimately be anchored by Pete Rock and CL Smooth’s 1992 single the song that plays over the main menu and sets the tone for the entire game. Organized around a regal saxophone loop, “T.R.O.Y.” is itself an exercise in nostalgia, a wistful trip down memory lane that delves into intergenerational relationships, asserts a deep connection with the dead, and exists here to underscore Vol. 2’s identity as a golden era throwback. It is the rare song that genuinely never gets old.“When you work on a project like that, you hear the songs, especially the first one or two, tens of thousands of times, because you keep turning the game on and off to check stuff and make sure things work,” said Myhill. “And I don’t ever get sick of that track. I hear it in my head and it’s like warm, fuzzy feelings. And I’ve never had that with another song in a game.

I’ve only wanted to like punch a song in the face, because you’ve heard it 400 times.”. At one point, the Vol. 2 team invited three consultants to the Vancouver campus: Just Blaze, then the hottest producer of the planet, the rapper Jensen “Hot Karl” Karp, and a pre- Get Rich or Die Tryin’ 50 Cent. Canadian border agents turned away 50 Cent on account of his prior felonies and he promptly hopped on the next flight back to New York.Karp recalled that by the time of his visit, the team had already developed mood boards with “New York street, kind of Rucker-based graphics.” In one meeting, he suggested “T.R.O.Y.” as the game’s theme song, an inspired idea that received the immediate blessing of Just Blaze. “Just Blaze was like, ‘Yes, that is bonkers, yes,’” Karp remembered.Just Blaze took them down to the studio to lay down original beats for the game.

“We spent a million bucks on our studio, it was a money-is-no-expense studio,” Myhill said. “And he just came in and he killed it. I’ve never seen anything like it. He basically threw down the songs in no time at all, like he was inspired from somewhere. It was a crazy, life-changing experience, watching what that guy did.”“It was always a story from the night before that would have actually inspired a name for one of the tracks,” Mozell said. “I’ll never forget, ‘Plan B,’ one of the tracks in the soundtrack, came about from one of the events of the night before.”. Electronic Arts“I think the art style helped liberate you from having a completely believable performance,” Myhill said of Vol.

“But if you look at NBA Street 3, we went a little bit more photoreal. We didn’t do that street-shading effect on the skin, and it looked a little bit less painterly or iconic and graphic. So then, if a player moves really snappily, it’s kind of shitty, because we’re actually putting skin textures and trying to make this look photorealistic. So then you got to slow everything down so it looks better, but then it kind of plays shittier.”Like albums and films, video games are the product not only of their collaborators, but of a specific time and organic chemistry that can’t be easily replicated. The designers of Vol.

2 have since enjoyed successful careers at various companies in the video game industry, but they remain friends and reminisce often over Vol. 2, a painstaking project that they characterize today as a labor of love.“We truly loved the product,” said Gibbons.

Game of thrones ascent titles. Retrieved 19 December 2011. Retrieved 19 December 2011. 26 September 2011. Archived from on 16 October 2011. Yell, Joshua (21 September 2011).

“We loved it, and we lived it. We were younger, we didn’t have families.”. I have in my possession both Vol. 2 and NBA 2K18, the basketball video game of record.

2 is the better game. Playing to 21 points in Vol.

2 versus playing timed quarters introduces a different vibe from 2K18, suffusing the basketball gaming experience with a timeless, elegiac, and joyous playground innocence. Playing a game of 2K18 is intense, immersive, and entertaining, but sparks no such joy; it is much more likely to spark a heart attack. And while 2K18 succeeds in capturing the precise movements and dynamics of an NBA game and the idiosyncrasies of each player’s style, it is ultimately an overproduced quagmire that attempts to hold the gamer captive through pregame national anthem and studio halftime analysis. The 2K18 main menu flashes a quote from Kyrie Irving that reads, “Basketball isn’t a game, it’s an art form.” This is the de facto tagline of a game that itself takes no artistic liberties, but rather seeks to recreate the broadcast experience as faithfully as possible.“A traditional sports game is trying to be broadcast TV,” Mozell said, “so it has to keep up with and get ahead of what of broadcast TV can do. It’s a hectic experience. It’s produced that way. And what’s very interesting is that even 15 years ago, one of our mantras was to be anti-broadcast.

But we had to create our own vocabulary and our own visual presentation that didn’t feel like TV and kept you on the court, and kept the ball in your hand.”. It is also significant that Vol. 2 predates the attachment between game console and internet.

The commitment of 2K18 and most modern sports games to a slavish verisimilitude enabled by the internet is a blessing and a curse. When John Wall gets sidelined with arthroscopic knee surgery IRL, you’re stuck with Tomas Satoranksy at point guard in the game. Eschewing 2K18 and opting to instead play Vol. 2 allows one to flee Satoranksy’s oppressive reign and revisit a simpler time in life and in video game technology.For me, a forlorn Sonics fan, Vol. 2 allows me to revisit that ennobling era when Vladimir Radmanovic roamed the hardwood—an era I could not fully appreciate in its time, but which now overwhelms with emotion my digital age, Sonic-less sang-froid when proffered to me. 2 has, in fact, changed–it is no longer old-school vs. New-school, but older-school vs.

The nostalgic element has multiplied. 15 years later, it still feels fresh and exhilarating. It is the feeling of Radmanovic breaking his foes’ ankles in quick succession before levitating to the hoop for a triumphant Honey Dip.

A more pure representation of the joy and expressive elements of basketball has never been made, and likely never will be.

Contents.Gameplay NBA Street is a basketball video game of three-on-three. Aside from the basic structure of basketball, players try to collect trick points, which are scored through the use of almost every basketball game maneuver such as faking out defenders, shot blocking, diving for the ball,. If a team fills a special meter through flashy and effective, they get to perform a Gamebreaker, which is a special shot that not only adds to their score, but it subtracts an amount from their opponents' score.Single player options included a user-created player touring famous American locations, picking up teammates from NBA rosters along the way.The gameplay could be considered an 'arcade' style of basketball in that it is not a true simulation, similar to the series. For instance, in-game players are able to jump high enough to grab three-point shots mid-arc (goaltending is permitted and is often used as a defensive strategy).

Games are scored not by traditional standards, as two-point field goals are worth one point, while made shots behind the 3-point line are worth two. Instead of a time limit, the first team to score 21 points are deemed the winner. However, the winner must win by 2.Cast and characters Twenty-nine NBA teams are playable, with rosters from around.

However, only 5 players are available from each team., who announced his comeback from his second retirement with the a few months after the PlayStation 2 release, is available on both the Gamecube and PlayStation 2 versions. He was however removed as the 'Final Challenge' in the Gamecube version as he now played for the Washington Wizards in the game. Instead, the City Circuit ended once a player beat the Street Legend 'Stretch'.The game introduced several recurring characters called Street Legends, fictional basketball players who served as the series', each masterful in a particular aspect of basketball and representing a specific area of the United States.

Their personalities and appearances were loosely inspired by real players, such as Stretch, the 'cover athlete' who resembled in looks and abilities.The Street Legends are, in order, Biggs, Bonafide, Drake, DJ, Takashi, and Stretch.Commentator Joe 'The Show' Jackson is voiced by.Reception ReceptionReview scoresPublicationScoreN/A8.17/108.5/1030/4031/409.25/109.25/10N/AB+8.8/109.3/1090%91%GameZone8/10N/A8.6/109.3/10N/A4.5/5N/AN/AN/AN/A90%N/A8/10Aggregate score88/10089/100In the United States, NBA Street 's version sold 1.7 million copies and earned $57 million by August 2006. Between January 2000 and August 2006, this release was the 18th highest-selling game launched for the, or consoles in the United States. Combined sales for all NBA Street games released between January 2000 and August 2006, across the three game systems, reached 5.5 million units in the United States by the latter date.Kevin Toyama reviewed the PlayStation 2 version of the game for, rating it four stars out of five, and stated that 'Despite a few small imperfections, NBA Street delivers a basketball experience even spots game cynics can't help but love.' The game received 'favorable' reviews on both platforms according to video game. In Japan, gave it a score of 31 out of 40 for the PS2 version, and 30 out of 40 for the GameCube version.With the success of the NBA Street series, EA Sports BIG expanded to the format to with and with. Barnes, J.C.

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