NBA 2K6
December 26,2005 - With winter beginning, arenas have been getting hot. Hot courts signify that the NBA season is underway. With new faces in new places, as well as rivalries rekindled, there has to be a way for armchair superstars to get more of the basketball stuff they crave. Luckily for gamers, this year’s version of the NBA 2K series delivers.

You’re probably wondering what happened to the ESPN tag. Well, to put a long story short, EA Sports bought that along with the NFL license. While 2K Sports fans haven’t quenched their thirst for a gridiron game, Take-Two has indeed made an NBA game. Like all passed NBA 2K’s before it, the amount of changes made just drastically change the gameplay enough to pick it up for another year.

Gone are the flashy ESPN-powered menus and their commentators. No big deal. 2K Sports has decided to take a new step with the gameplay as well, taking a page out of EA’s book and giving the right analog stick of your controller a meaning.

What separates this game from the games before it is the freedom you have with your players. Offensively, using the right analog stick, you can shoot the ball. While it’s still assigned to the necessary trigger, you can use the right analog stick to add or take away some pressure with your shots. Clock running out and the only way to end it is to lob it quick? Pull a Derek Fisher by lightly tapping the stick to arch the ball up and, hopefully, sink the shot. Defensively, you can use the right analog stick to control your defender’s hands. Tilting the stick left will cause a defender to swat with the left arm, and tilting right would cause the right arm to move. You can even combine some of these motions with another button to jump or keep your hands up to dominate the way a monster like Shaq would.

While the gameplay mechanics have certainly improved to make the controls a bit more user-friendly, it certainly doesn’t mean the developers wanted to make the game easier. In fact, it’s not. An “aggression” button has replaced the turbo button that pretty much works the same way, but instead of just playing at a faster pace, you can add more finesse to what you’re doing. By holding the aggression button, you can pass the ball with more zip to the throw, juke with more effectiveness, or something as simple as trying to land a slammer through the key. The defensive is where it’s at though; you can jump higher to pack what can be an “easy” shot, or just for the sake of it—you can shove others with a lot more force. It’s actually pretty funny when it’s done, but we haven’t noticed an increase chance of injury. That’s probably a good thing though.

It definitely sounds like you can just dominate with these controls, but sometimes the game can be impossible—depending on whom you face. A lot of the upper tier teams like San Antonio and Indiana use the triangle offense effectively, and even with the freedom you have with the controls, it’s hard to defend without putting yourself in a bigger hole. Offensively, if you keep doing the same thing and shooting with the same people, the defense will take notice and play to shut your game plan down. So to put it in short words, the AI in NBA 2K6 is not only realistic, it’s hard downright difficult as well.

If you just live and breathe the NBA, Association Mode is for you. Association Mode is the game’s franchise mode, which lets you call the shots as the owner of an NBA franchise. Vast improvements have been made over last year’s game, and some confusing parts (like the crappy minigames) have just been removed. Instead, the bulk of the franchise mode is its scouting system. You can scout players all-year round, like in College Hoops 2K5. And once the off-season comes, you can send for them and actually play with these rookie prospects in practice games to get a feel of how to use these guys. This makes the draft process a lot easier than simply drafting out of text and hoping they’d have a good player rating.

One of the more popular modes of last year’s game, 24/7, has also received a bit of an overhaul. This career mode pretty much takes a page out of NBA Street; it’s your job to build a team from scratch to compete in a tournament against the game’s best streetballers. In order to make the EBC (Entertainer’s Basketball Challenge), you have to work your way up the ranks, and actually make a team. Unlike the NBA, your team is built around the player you’ve created, and it’s your job to make him one of the best.

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