NBA Shootout 2000 (PlayStation)

989 Studios took last year off to refine the NBA Shootout series with new features and improved visuals and control. While this task was certainly accomplished, the choice between EA's NBA Live 2000 and NBA Shootout 2000 is one of personal preference, as both games are just about equal in what they offer.

NBA Shootout 2000 features all of the real NBA teams, players, and arenas and has all of the usual trimmings that come with an officially licensed basketball game. In addition, the game has most typical game modes, such as exhibition, season, and play-offs. The one new feature that NBA Shootout 2000 has that has never been seen before is a create-a-dunk feature. You can easily articulate and position the limbs of the players in all sorts of different ways. You can either create realistic dunks or crazy impossible dunks. The create-a-dunk feature, while unique and fun at first, is rather limited and loses its luster after you make a few dunks.

The control in NBA Shootout 2000 has definitely been improved since Shootout 98. The game just feels a lot tighter and more responsive than ever before. But easily the best thing about NBA Shootout 2000 is its shooting system, called touch shooting. The system takes the guesswork out of shooting baskets in a video game by displaying a meter that you have to get just right in order to sink a shot. It's simply designed and doesn't slow the pace of the game down at all. When you press the circle button to shoot the ball, a little meter appears that has a marker that ascends through three colors. If you release the button when the marker is in the yellow zone, the shot is as good as in. Releasing the circle button early or late will, of course, send the shot on a not-so-certain course.

The game's artificial intelligence, while quite impressive at first, makes its problems known after you spend some time with the game. Once you get a feel for the game and start beating the computer consistently, you can bump up the game's difficulty setting. Unfortunately, doing this really only improves the computer's shooting percentage and doesn't really change how it plays. One exception to the game's overall realism is in the number of steals and shot blocks that will occur during a game. If you know typical basketball numbers, you'll see that NBA Shootout 2000's are almost always abnormally high.