Player Hater

"He's from the Toronto team," I say lamely. I'm not really a hometown booster or anything, I'd just been happy I'd been able to recognize any of the players I had to choose from.

"Yeah, but he wants to leave," Marty grumbles.

This is why I invited Marty. We were hanging out a few weeks ago and he'd been rhapsodizing about Charles Barkley's interviewing style. Not only does he watch basketball, but he plays it -- so he's two up on me when it comes to critiquing NBA Ballers(Midway, 2004).

I'm not a sports game fan, as regular readers of this column will have probably guessed. Not being interested in sports mythology, it seems like too much work -- picking your players, changing their stats, customizing the rules -- it's like a jock flavour of role playing games. I let Marty start off in possession of the controller. I'm inclined to go straight to quickplay if that were an option, but he starts off by browsing the options. "I like to do this just to get a sense of the game," he says, scrolling through difficulty levels like "Got Skillz" and "Tru Playa." "It's all in the slang," Marty says.

I knew that hip-hop and basketball culture had a lot of crossover, but it completely saturates this game. "It's generally rock for hockey games, bad generic rock," Marty says. He and I are both hip-hop fans, so it's a'ight. And on the topic of whitey awkwardly using black slang, the game begins with the announcer enunciating "in the hizzle" and "ballers" as if they had quotes around them. It's a relief when he turns over the announcing to MC Supernatural, the freestyle rap champ who does play-by-play on your one-on-one.

Turns out Vince Carter is a pretty strong player, dick or no. Marty chooses a little guy whose name I forget, and though I'm able to get a couple of monster dunks in, Marty keeps swishing these three-pointers. "Man!" I say when he pulled into the lead, amazed.

"Yeah, he's a shooter."

"Like, in real life?"

"Yeah. I know what players' skills are, so I've got an edge on you that way."

It takes a couple of matches to get the hang of the defensive and offensive moves, and the button mashing I'm doing (to some effect) at the beginning gets a little more finessed. The two thumbsticks on the Xbox controllers let you move with one and deke with the other, and getting a shot off is often a case of waiting for a hole in your opponent's defence and sliding through. There are a few players who seemed to be more unstoppable, however, capable of powering through and dunking regardless of the defence. The reactions of the winning and losing players are pretty varied, as are the off-the-cuff comments from MC Supernatural. "It's pretty fun," Marty exclaims.

After Marty beats me a few more times we try the single player mode. Called "Rags to Riches," it starts out with a CGI movie describing the narrative of the game -- that you've been chosen for a new kind of reality show dreamt up by network execs, pitting a young nobody from the streets against the seasoned pros. A pretty standard narrative, but the CGI movie that lays it out is interesting. Instead of having the network execs simply discuss the scheme, they're frozen as if put on pause and a voice-over by a rapper explains it. While he does, the camera viewpoint circles the immobile execs.

Probably the intent was just to make it stylish, but it also dodges having to explicitly depict the execs as craven and is a good deal more visually interesting than seeing talking heads, especially since the lip-synching thing hasn't been licked yet. Pausing the game in mid-play also uses this effect of slowly circling the frozen players -- it's almost hypnotizing, and it shows off the detail of the body language. Rather than always trying to make CGI models behave organically, why not appreciate them for their robotic sheen once in a while?

While I've been ruminating on the good use of the medium, Marty's been customizing our player. For a game made up mostly of black basketball players, the default character starts off white -- a strange choice. Marty makes him black, thin, tall, big eared, skinny-nosed and huge noggin'd, and sends our unlikely hero onto the court where booty and bling await.