NBA Full Court Press (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.5 stars OK
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 5.3 (2.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Stephen Poole
• Reviewed on: 12/05/1996
• Updated on: 05/01/2000
• Released on: 08/31/1996
• Originally published on GameSpot: NBA Full Court Press (PC) Review

As you run down the features of Microsoft's NBA Full Court Press, there's good reason to believe it has the potential to seriously challenge the primacy of Electronic Arts' NBA Live games. It has all the essentials: 29 NBA teams and nearly every NBA player (Michael and Shaq can't be included for contractual reasons), along with Western and Eastern Conference All-Star teams and four custom teams you can mold to suit your tastes.

You can play a single game, play an entire season consisting of 32, 56, or 82 games with variable lengths for playoff series, head straight for the playoffs (again, you choose the length of each series), or even take your team on the court for practice. The team editor lets you trade players to reflect current rosters, and the player editor lets you change names, number, ratings, and hair style.

It's after you've adjusted your line-up and selected your coaching strategies (offensive and defensive stances, up to five offensive plays out of 100) that you'll get to the most fun part of NBA Full Court Press: the action on the court. Four-button joystick support gives you a high degree of control over the players, and an option to control a single player (instead of always being the ball handler or switching from defensive player to defensive player) means you can call for the ball on fast breaks, alley oops, and backdoor slams. Player animation is extremely smooth and realistic, with defensive players backpedaling, dribblers spinning to evade a press, and shooters launching turnaround jumpers - and, of course, various slams and jams. The only gripe I have with the animation is that players on the receiving end of a fast-break pass stop dead in their tracks to make the catch before resuming their journey to the basket: It looks silly, and allows the defense to catch when they shouldn't be able to.

Adding to the experience is the play-by-play commentary by Kevin Calabro, voice of the Seattle Supersonics. He's one of the best in the biz, and if you've never heard him before you'll get a real kick out of his trademark expressions, like "24-second violation, camping in the lane - Kumbaya," "He's on him like Cagney with half a grapefruit," "You gotta get up for the downstroke," and my favorite, "Googily Moogily!" (pardon the spelling).

But once you've dug into the game, you'll start finding many, many problems - some big, some small, all annoying - that keep this from being anything more than a fun arcade-style hoops game. For starters, there's no manual, only online help. True, the online help is extensive, but it's a real pain in the butt to exit a screen and load the help file, instead of simply having a manual opened up by the keyboard for quick reference.

On the strategic side, you'll notice that the schedule is from last season, and that there's no way to create a new one to reflect this year's action. Team rosters, too, are from last season, and swapping players two at a time to reflect current rosters would be quite a chore - not to mention the fact that you won't find key rookies such as Kobe Bryant, Marcus Camby, John Wallace, Stephon Marbury, and many others unless you edit an existing player or a player on a custom team. Speaking of custom teams, they can only be used in single games, not season or playoff modes. And don't bother to check for box scores during or after a game - there are no team stats for a game, and you can only get game stats for individual players while the game's in progress.

But you ain't seen nothing yet. It might sound strange, but where FCP reaches its highest frustration quotient is in the same area where it looks and feels the best: out on the court. Just take a look at what's wrong here:

Mishandling of the 24-second clock. The 24-second clock is supposed to reset after a defensive foul, but in FCP it just keeps going and going. This is wrong, dead wrong, and that it made it past the developers and Microsoft is simply amazing.

Substitutions after scores. The only time you're allowed to sub players in real life is during a time out or after a foul, but computer-controlled teams in Full Court Press are allowed to - and will - send in subs after nearly every other basket. What's more, your team will be subbing almost as furiously if you allow the computer to handle the chore for you. You'd think with this much practice the computer would make good substitution decisions, but it doesn't: Playing as Indiana, I saw Reggie Miller get five fouls in the first half (I wasn't controlling him on four of those penalties) and the computer kept him in the game!

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