The first area this game needs work in is control. What it boils down to is that with so many people on the court at the same time, it’s next to impossible to be in control of the defensive action. Your fall back plan is to focus your effort on one or two guys and hope the computer’s artificial intelligence is adequate enough to stop the outside shots. Most of the time it isn’t though and defense becomes very difficult. At that point, the game feels like it is a race to see who can score the most points when it is there turn on offense.

The offensive controls are better, but could use some improvement as well. First of all, the double tap method they use for shooting is not very effective. You press the button once and a halo appears around the ball. It’ll be red, yellow or green depending on where you are in the jump. When you press the shoot button again, your player releases the ball. This scheme was difficult for me to get used to. Every fiber of my being wants to hold the shoot button then release it at the apex of the jump. Having to press it twice can be gotten used to but the tried and true method feels quite a bit more natural.

Where it really gets confusing is performing alley-oops, lay ups and dunks. Alley-oops do not always fire off (the person you are passing to has to be open) so you don’t know exactly when your guy is going to pass the ball. Double tapping after a pass that sometimes goes off and sometimes does not can be tricky indeed. Lay ups are hard because you only have a split second to double tap, and dunks are inconsistent because you don’t need to double tap at all. You just charge the basket and hit the shoot button once. Given that, it can be unnerving when you think you are doing a dunk, but because you aren’t moving fast enough you end up in a lay-up and miss the second tap, bricking what should be an easy shot.

It gets even worse when you start talking about movement controls. Because everything about the physics of the game is tied to the animation, some very annoying side effects show up. The first one I noticed right off the bat is that offensive ball handlers get stuck on defenders. There are controls for juking left or right, but they only appear to work when you have a significant amount of speed built up. Once you are facing off with a defender, good luck driving past him. You’d be better off just passing it to someone else. The other thing that drove me up the walls was the fact that going out of bounds was so easy. They make it next to impossible to drive past someone, but highly probable that when you grab a rebound and turn to drive back to your goal you go out of bounds.

I understand the allure of making a game realistic, but you can literally break the game using it. In one example, you pass the ball in to a 3-point shooter who has coverage. Shoot the ball and the defender knocks it out of bounds. You get possession. Lather, rinse, and repeat. I actually had someone run the clock down on me doing that exact thing online. That’s pretty lame if you ask me.

The other area that seems like it could use improvement, but may just be limited by the system is graphics and sound. While the court and backgrounds look very nice, the players blend together and are difficult, if not impossible to tell apart. They do have minor decorations to try to tell them apart like armbands and different hairstyles, but they are so small, it doesn’t really help much. This lack of detail can make it difficult to decide who to pass to and when to try to shoot three pointers.

The sound is decent for the most part, but I noticed that in some parts, the sound seems over amplified because it made the speakers or headphones pop. I thought I was having legitimate sound issues, but after testing with other games I found that it was the game itself and not the system. Other than occasional sound popping, that manifested itself mostly during the menus (the animation of a player dribbling made the speakers pop whenever the ball bounced) the game sounded like a basketball game. Various referee calls can be heard, and of course the sound of the basket being dunked (a happy sound indeed).

One area the game does not fall short in is content. Not only does it have the typical 5 on 5 exhibition games, but also you can play entire seasons and manage your team while you do so. There are mini games as well including a skills challenge where you have to dribble through an obstacle course, passing the ball through various hoops and making different shots. There is a paint game where you shoot from different locations on the court. Every shot you make turns the area red or blue depending on your color. The goal is to get as many points as you can in one minute. The last mini game is a 3-pointer contest. See how many threes you can shoot from various locations around the court.

These mini games as well as the exhibition game are both playable online as well. Once you get your access point set up correctly, you’ll find a perfect translation from single player to multiplayer waiting for you. There was no lag that I could tell and it was incredibly easy to find a game to join. Like many games, this one shines brightest while being played against another person.

For all its faults, NBA is a decent full court basketball game. In truth there hasn’t been a really great one, no matter the system. The two on two and twenty-one varieties have been done very well, but no one has been extremely successful at anything where you control more than two players at a time. So I wouldn’t say that NBA is any worse than its predecessors (with the exception of the double-tap to shoot) but it doesn’t solve many of the glaring issues that exist with this type of game. Still, It’s portable and online at the same time; two features that will go far towards selling copies of this particular game.