AND 1 is this big basketball tour/competition type thing, sponsored by AND 1 footwear. Every year, some street players run around with the tour, complete with licensed rap music and mass product placement. Basically everyone plays ball, and then sits around drinking cool refreshing Pepsi while listening to Snoop Dogg. Don’t forget to start crackin’ wise about people’s mamas. It’s actually a pretty good representation of the culture and music that surrounds the AND 1 franchise, and this comes across in the street style interfaces and character customization. Those not interested or even annoyed by the scene will switch off immediately (maybe you should just avoid it entirely), as this is full of manufactured in-your-face attitude. Deal with it.
Looks cool, plays ghetto.
With all the style inherent in the presentation, it would have been nice to back it up with some above-average visuals. Unfortunately, Streetball fails to bring any real pizzazz to da hizzouse. Each player looks and feels plastic, like pre-determined action figures with strict move sets and zero fluidity. By the way, "strict move sets" refers to all the tricks one can pull off with the ball to diss some other fool’s rep. These don’t flow at all with the actual useful game mechanics with basketball – that is, running and jumping. Try one of the many confusing moves using buttons and stick movements, and the player will wobble around for a bit doing his thang, then you are left standing there again. For a game that relies so heavily on trick mechanics, it’s almost as if the basketball gameplay and trick animations were worked on separately, in secret from one another.
Your trick moves are set up with three levels of coolness, and the goal is to score an “ankle breaker”, which is when you bust so much style and trickery with the ball, your defender just can’t take the servage any longer and falls flat on his be-hind. This leaves the court wide open (especially in a one-on-one match) for you to stop spamming the right stick, and take it to the hoop. Don’t forget to check out the insta-cool slow motion replay.
I’m not being sarcastic for no reason. The ideas are great, and could provide for some absolutely killer multiplayer mayhem, as well as a decent single-player campaign. Basketball, and indeed Streetball, can provide decent games, including the NBA Street series. But the single player mode is just so tedious and overwrought with boredom, and tries so hard to pass itself off as coolness, that the multiplayer is just plain irritating. A two-player match will go down something like this: Player 1 grabs the ball and stands still for a while, pressing the right stick every which way except back on the shelf. Player 2 stands there in front of Player 1, hitting the steal button over and over. The player who will actually come up victorious is anyone’s guess, as the game controls so badly and unreliably that it really isn’t something which one can predict. Not that a good sports game should be predictable either, but it should at least rely on the skill of a player rather than shoddy game mechanics. So, the game tries to be cool without actually being good. That’s like Big Brother people thinking they are famous and talented.
Try harder, stealing is hard to do.
The game modes are all pretty stock standard, and really just break down to the single player mode, multiplayer and quick play. The single player tour has you take control of a regular player from the street trying to make it big with AND 1. Pretty much ripped from recent Tony Hawk games, but then again they were probably ripped from something else. Anyway, customise your ball player, and hit the streets beginning with simple one-on-one matches, working your way up to the big time. The games also give you specific goals to complete (for example, perform a certain number of tricks or steals). If you don’t complete the objectives, you lose no matter how many points you win by, and how awesome you are at actually playing the proper rules of basketball.
Honestly, some fanatical b-ballers could probably have an average night of fun, but possibly only if fueled by copious amounts of alcohol. They would also have to be into the underground streetball scene – which is surely great fun in practice, but without a half-decent attempt at a quality game, the appeal of AND 1 Streetball will completely fly past unnoticed. Steer clear of this deflated piece of sporting equipment; it’ll take more effort than this to pump it up. Word.
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