G-pinions

In a world where video game reviews are taken way too seriously, a street corner preacher will stand tall atop his soapbox and extol the virtues of reviewing games only after they have been played to exhaustion. If such a person actually existed, I would stand right alongside this screaming man, handing out pamphlets to further sway passersby. I suffered through the likes of Hotel Dusk and Lost Planet to give the definitive word on the horrendous experiences I had to endure. But sometimes, a game is so ill conceived, it takes little more than an hour to solve the puzzle and deem it a failure. Electronic Arts made my job pretty easy with NBA Street Homecourt. It is so ludicrously awful, I could not even figure out what elements people are supposed to have fun with.

Normally, I only play EA games with a loaded gun pointed unwavering at my brow. There is a reason I have avoided their products for more than a decade - they don't make good games. But my expectations were different with Homecourt. I was actually looking forward to playing it. With the NBA playoffs at full throttle, I needed a basketball video game to sooth my beating heart during the hours when live basketball was not an option. And not only did I crave video ball, but I specifically demanded one that veered away from the sometimes sluggish pace of a simulation. A game without the full assortment of players clogging the court or utilitarian rules weighing me down. I was in the mood for NBA Jam, and Homecourt is the closest thing the industry has going right now. If anything, I was so excited for some street balling action, I would have looked past any little problems. For once in my life, I was actually biased towards an EA game, and they still managed to let me down.

Homecourt breaks the two most important aspects of arcade-style basketball: the pace and the rules. The pace, which should move at a blistering rate, is chunky and uneven. Because the game is all about showboating, offensive possessions actually take longer than they would in a normal NBA contest. With players rolling the ball around the count and spinning like Mikhail Baryshnikov, it feels more like a dance competition than a basketball game. When you get the ball on offense, you madly jam on the X and Y buttons to perform moves. This makes your player dribble the ball through their legs, roll it along the court, and generally behave like the ass of an ill mannered horse. Every possession has you striving not only to score, but to rack up style points as well. So every possession takes forever. You just dribble around like a selfish Harlem Globetrotter until you feel like dunking.

Notice I said dunking. This brings us to the other fatal flaw: the rules. Jump shots are completely useless in Homecourt. When making a stripped down version of a real sport, you have to carefully decide which rules to keep and which to toss by the wayside. Obviously, the vast majority of rules are useless, serving only to slow down the frantic pace. But there are certain rules that are necessary for a game to maintain some structure. For some reason, EA abolished goaltending. This means that every time someone tries to shoot the ball, you can just jump up and grab it right out of the sky. In NBA Jam, this was a feature you had to earn. Homecourt makes the process of snatching a shot right out of the air so ordinary, it removes any thrill of playing defense.

This breaks the game beyond repair. Every offensive possession is the same because the only legitimate way to score is by way of a dunk. On the other side of the court, the best strategy is to just hang back by the hoop and try to knock shots out of the sky or push would be dunkers to the ground. I played a few games against the computer on various difficulty settings and saw no variation in offensive strategy. Dribble like a fool and then dunk. I tried a few online games as well to see how people who have been playing since February performed. Though the moves they used to humiliate their opponent (me) were more diverse, such as rocketing the ball off my face from a foot away, the game was still a sloppy dribbling fest followed by a crazy dunk. Over and over and over again.

I have no idea how this could be considered fun.

NBA Jam is infinitely more entertaining than this game despite being developed more than a decade ago. There is a bigger emphasis on defense, more variety on offense and the experience is not halted by unwieldy special moves and inane trash talking. Homecourt is a complete joke. If it can't please a diehard basketball fan craving some arcade action, it clearly has no place in this world.