NBA Street V3 (Xbox)

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Both the player-creation and court-creation feature factor heavily into the game's primary single-player mode, which is the street challenge. Over the course of 10 weeks, you'll take your player on a tour of the game's 12 different courts, playing dozens of different types of challenges in order to build your street rep. Your rep will allow you to recruit better and better players onto your team. While at the outset you'll play against no-name streetballers, toward the end you'll be running with and alongside NBA stars that all have their own agendas and egos. Of course, along the way you'll be earning thousands of points, which can be used to upgrade your own character's skills and wardrobe or to add new adornments to your created court. The variety of different challenges available to you and the reward of playing alongside your favorite NBA stars make the street challenge mode a worthwhile and compelling single-player feature. As it takes dozens of matches to get through the full 10 weeks, doing one street challenge should keep you busy for quite some time as well.

NBA Street V3 also includes a slam-dunk contest mode. Thankfully, for those of us who found NBA Live 2005's dunk mode more frustrating than fun, this dunk contest proves to be a lot easier. You can set the contest up for two to eight dunkers, and like the gamebreaker dunks, you'll be jumping up high into the air to pull off a string of midair moves before finally throwing it down. You can spice up your dunks by doing different kinds of tosses, such as throwing the ball off the glass or bouncing the ball off the floor and catching it in midair. You can also make use of various props around the court to jump over, like tables, ball racks, or porta-potties. The dunk mode in NBA Street V3 is an amusing diversion, but ultimately not very deep, so it's not likely to hold your attention for as long as NBA Live 2005's dunk mode.

Rounding out the list of major features in NBA Street V3 is the introduction of online play for the Xbox and PS2 versions of the game. In both cases you'll be connected to EA's proprietary online service, so you'll be able to take advantage of its standard features, such as ladders, messaging, and news. For online play you have the option of using standard NBA teams or creating your own online baller and team. If you choose the latter, you'll not only earn points toward your ranking for winning games, but also you'll get points that you can use to upgrade your online character's skills and appearance. In our testing, online play was smooth and responsive on both PS2 online and Xbox Live. Unfortunately, online matches must always consist of one human player against another, so there are no cooperative or team-play modes available online. Offline play allows for up to six human players to play with and against each other on the PS2 with a multitap.

In lieu of online play, the Nintendo GameCube version of the game includes a trio of characters from the Mario games: Mario, Luigi, and Princess Peach. Their presence in the game is a little awkward. The characters do appear 3D and cartoonish, but the contrast gives the game somewhat of a Space Jam-kind of feel. They're much shorter and stubbier than the NBA players in the game, so some of the juke moves they make look a bit strange. When they do dunk the ball or make a successful shake on a defender, you'll hear some Mario-esque power-up sounds to give the game even more of a Nintendo flavor. There's even a Nintendo-themed court that serves as the Mario All-Stars' home. The bottom line is that if you liked the idea in the first place, then the execution of this feature won't leave you feeling disappointed. The good news for those who can't get over the strange contrast is that the Mario characters are never forced on you--they're all on their own team--so if you don't want to use them or see them, you don't have to.

The graphical presentation in NBA Street V3 is as slick as the gameplay. Player models and faces are drawn with an urban graffiti style. Combined with the various gritty light filters applied to different courts, the game's overall look comes off even more "street" than previous games in the series, and this look fits the game's themes well. The animations for the various tricks and dunks are also done very well, although you'll still experience some amount of popping as some animations transition to others. It's noteworthy that NBA Street V3 maintains a sharp look across all three platforms; there doesn't seem to be a marked graphical difference between the Xbox and the other two platforms.

About the only disappointment as far as presentation goes is with the game's sound, and that's only a relative disappointment, as the actual court sounds of dribbling and dunking are sharp and impactful. DJ Bobbito Garcia is back as the play-by-play announcer, so if you didn't like him in Street Vol. 2, you're probably going to be just as irritated with his loud, abrasive style this time around. The music is somewhat better than the announcing, with a soundtrack highlighted by a new Beastie Boys track, and some old-school hip-hop beats like De La Soul's "Me, Myself, and I," and a heavily sanitized remix of House of Pain's "Jump Around." Still, it seems like the game could have used a few more tracks, as the music seems to get repetitive after a while.

NBA Street V3 offers a fantastic amount of content, from tons of unlockables and customizable options in the single-player game to the addition of a smooth online mode. The developers have also managed to make significant meaningful tweaks to the gameplay without wrecking a proven formula for fun. If you're a fan of basketball, you owe it to yourself to check out NBA Street V3, which is the new king of the court as far as arcade basketball games go.

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