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NBA Street for GCN REVIEW By: Kazooie

For those of you who have never played NBA Street here's some small info about it. NBA Street is a 3 on 3 street ball type game. That is what NBA Street is all about. But what makes it the game it is are its many awesome player tricks. Like crazy crossovers, high-flying jams, and insane alley oops, and many other crazy stuff!

Features that are included: -3 on 3 street ball
-Intense 2 player head to head action
-Build your own Baller and improve his skills by winning games and getting lots of trick points.
-A new court in DC called ''The Paint''
-All the NBA Teams
-Updated Rosters as of January 2002
-Better graphics than its PS2 cousin
-A large collection of street ball legends to add to your team!
-Lots of Crazy Tricks
-Improved Graphics that are better than PS2's version

Nothing gets your energy flowing like a good competitive game of basketball, and NBA Street makes things even more interesting by throwing in a few curves to the usually stale and boring NBA Jam type game play. In NBA Street you not only have to win, but you have to look good doing it. Each team has a momentum meter that goes up when you perform tricks, fadeouts, and score points, and goes down when you get blocked or have a shot clock violation. When your momentum meter gets full, you are given a limited amount of time to perform your ''Game breaker''. When you make a gamebreker it not only gives you points but also takes away points from your opponent. If you make a 1-point shot there is a 2-point net point change, and when you make a long-range game breaker there is a 4-point net change. The game breakers are really cool looking and really add a lot to the game in terms of strategy. When your opponent has a game breaker you have to decide if you want to try and stall out the clock, or just make a basket and try to get a stop on D. To score the most amounts of points you will have to learn the art of the combo. To do combos you simply string together a series of moves within a four second time period. You can combo any of the following: dishes, blocks, dives, fadeouts, long-range shots, dunks, alley-oops, hook-ups (Dunk to mid air alley-oop) and steals. Put as many moves in as you can and they will count towards your combo as long as they were all within a 4 second time period (all combos must end with a score except for block combos).

In NBA Street you get two-main game play modes. Circuit and Hold the Court. In circuit mode, you travel from court to court taking on NBA teams and street ball legends. Each match gets progressively harder, and if you think you will just breeze through this game in a few hours, forget about it. The CPU opponents play smart, and play hard. If you screw up, or start taking bad shot they will make you pay. This is what I love the most about NBA Street. It perfectly recreates the true basketball experience where every point is crucial. Games in NBA Street are rarely blowouts unless your team is just completely outmatched, or you are playing someone who is new to the game. Each game is intense, and hardcore. The only other games that do this to me are Fighting games, and that is usually because somebody, be it my friend or the CPU, is being a cheap player.

The other mode of play is Hold the Court. The basic premise here is to win.......and win and win...etc. To unlock extra codes, secret teams, courts, and gear for your created player you need to get a winning streak high enough to beat the record-winning streak for that court. This is pretty fun, but you will probably want to take breaks every now and then, because beating the CPU 9 games in a row on the same court can get a little tedious. HTC also serves as the place where you go to engage in multiplayer matches. And multiplayer is definitely the highlight of NBA Street. Nothing beats throwing down nasty dunks, and vicious blocks on your friend. I just wish they had taken advantage of the 4 controller ports the GC offers because 4 players would be incredible. Then again you could always just have a 3LW vs. 3LW match and see who comes on top (Yes there is a 3LW team). The game also offers a street school mode that serves as a training mode..... But it isn't all that helpful.

Another thing that I really like is this game's Create a player mode. You start out with a limited amount of skill points, but you can build up your guy's skills by getting gobs of trick points in both HTC and Circuit mode. The selection of looks, outfits, shoes, and nicknames are excellent and allow a wide variety of looks for your created player. As a side note, the loading times are much improved over the PS2 version's horrendous load times. You had to wait forever in create a player for the items you load, and it took a long time to start up a normal game. All that is gone now, and everything loads very fast. Over all this game is just plain fun. Even cumersome controls cannot keep NBA Street from being the best Street ball game ever made, (NBA Jam deserves nothing more than to shine the shoes of NBA Street) and the best basketball game on the GC (sorry Courtside fans it's true). And there also aren't many good Basketball games out there with Create-a player.

This game will definitely never get boring! Especially with all the modes it has and how hard each one is! This game is definitely one sports game I like (I don't like many sports games; usually I go for RPG's and Fighting). I hope you will enjoy the game like I did!

Presentation NBA street presents itself with a very up to date style. Some of the character models look almost identical to the real player.	8.0
Graphics The graphics can be nice and smooth at times. One thing is for sure, it has better graphics than its PS2 cousin.	8.0
Gameplay Different play modes provide hours of fun. Play through the circuit or just play for fun!	9.0
Overall This is one fun sports game. With all the different modes, you won't be bored with this game.	8.8