The Gamer’s Quagmire: 4th Edition
- Jamison DeLorenzo

Gaming, humor, and insanity in harmony

Last week I off-handedly mentioned the best games that players remember. That got me thinking about all of the games that I have played during the Christmas holiday season. This week has been an interesting adventure in the realm of gaming, and not just because of the memory of Christmases past. As gamers grow older they always need to look inwards for their gaming gifts because everyone else is sick and tired of shopping for games that you may or may not already have. I guess it’s easier when your parents control your budget that way.

My best Christmas is still unquestionably the year I was given Castlevania IV for the Super Nintendo. That game came out in year one of the console’s existence and in my opinion was still one of the best when the end of game development for the console came to pass. Ever since then I have been doing my best to top that Christmas, and every year I fail despite my best efforts at planning otherwise. This year a new approach was taken.

This year I chose to focus on NBA games, which are usually an appealing commodity anyway. This sentiment may be lost to those of you that could not possibly care about basketball, or sports for that matter, and would rather stab themselves in the eye than play one of these games. The problem is that I am one of those disillusioned basketball fans that have a lot of trouble with the status quo of the NBA. It’s not important that you know all the reason. Instead, you should focus on the fact that sometimes compulsive game purchasing can lead to some catastrophic mistakes.

I had this idea after getting out of college that I would become a professional video game reviewer. This was in the day when there were tons of gaming review sites that didn’t know what they were talking about or were given money by companies to get a favorable opinion of a game. Hmmph, okay, that still happens. Still, this was while games weren’t all that expensive and quality budget titles were bountiful. Also I suffered from the pain of purchasing games that looked good but were complete garbage.

This year we have 3 major NBA titles to choose from, and after some research with a friend we decided to fork over some cash for one of the titles. Our choices were NBA Live 2006, NBA 2K6, and NBA 2006: The Life. For the past 4 years the game of choice has been the NBA Live franchise. Overall it has been a quality experience, but this being year one of EA’s aggressive attempts at gaining a sports monopoly we wanted to avoid that game. While we still let NBA Live be an option this year it fell under the not so sought after category of “purchase only if the other games are rife with a malodorous stench”.

Thankfully this did not start out (harbinger alert) looking as though it would be cause for concern. Several review sites and boards gave NBA Live a very bad score. When the biggest review sites and magazines are saying that an EA Sports game sucks that is significant considering that the yearly sludgefest known as Madden gets high scores. NBA: The Life is a new entrant and looked like it could be quite entertaining. Overall that was getting the most praise and screenshots were not vomit-inducing.

Unfortunately the gameplay is. In fact it was so bad the game was in my possession for a grand total of 1 hour 12 minutes. And yes, it was officially timed so it could enter the record books. This proved to be one of the few times my purchase receipts came in handy. The clerk at the gamestore was confused how one customer could be back into the store so quickly. When asked how bad the game was I had one of those reactions that you also see from a friend when asked how well the breakup went with his psycho girlfriend. Never before that moment was I tempted to tell the clerk to offer to do customers a favor and take the game off the shelf. Forgive me for being a bit too concise, but the gameplay stunk, the graphic quality was atrocious, the presentation was confusing, and the game features were abysmal.

On the plus side entering your name into a profile was smooth.

Slowly I was fearing that NBA Live was going to enter my house again. Those of you wondering what my sudden reservation about that franchise is need of reading the reviews or sampling the game in a store. In years past, while the CPU defense was occasionally really cheesy and frustratingly perfect (such as players like Shawn Bradley and Michael Olowokandi getting 12 blocks a game) the game was fun and the final scores and stats were not bad. This year the best new feature the game has to offer is the “Score At Will” feature, where the CPU plays defense with all the tenacity of a sleeping gerbil.

Based on all of these statements it probably was not all that hard to conclude that NBA 2K6 was the next game to arrive at home. Thankfully trade-in values are still somewhat passable. Everything about this game is better than the 2K5 version (other than Shaq being on the cover) and the previous NBA 2006 atrocity. The player creation mode is a lot more streamlined, the menu setup is cleaner, the game presentation is 10,000 times better, franchise mode exists (something that no NBA game should be without), and the unlockable material is mildly interesting. Even creating your own shoe is a complex process, which is an excellent example of meaningless feature content that adds so much to a game.

I did not intend to write something advocating a basketball game this week, but considering that no amount of vodka on the planet can make me forget how bad NBA 2006: The Life is almost anything less than a public service announcement raising warnings and alarms to not buy that game would have not been satisfactory. Thankfully, because NBA 2K6 is a very much a fun game, this Christmas story has a happy ending. Also, it is nice to know that even if your best laid plans do not net you the game you want for Christmas things could be worse- you could have gotten one of the worst games ever produced… or at least I hope you didn’t.

Post your comments in the Forum!