NBA 2K3 Review

If you're looking for a realistic game of basketball that simulates nearly every facet of the sport, then NBA 2K3 fits the bill incredibly well. You won't find much run-and-gun-style basketball, but what you will get is a great half-court game with plenty of post-up moves and a new ball-fake system that makes it even easier to drive through the lane and draw in the defense so you can draw a foul or pass off to an open teammate on the perimeter. You can try to play a quicker full-court game, but the default passing system in NBA 2K3 can be highly inaccurate at times, almost to the point that it passes the ball in the direction opposite the one selected with your controller input. NBA 2K3 has a few other issues as well, one of which is an odd shooting-percentage system that seems to punish you when your team has the lead in a game. These issues detract from an otherwise outstanding simulation of the NBA game.

NBA 2K3 emphasizes the half-court game and keeps fast breaks to a minimum.

Like other games in Sega's 2K3 series, NBA 2K3 features the new ESPN interface and an enhanced franchise mode. Of course, all the basic options are still there--you can trade players, sign free agents, and pore over your roster, all of which will help you put together a competitive team before the season begins. When it does start, you can access all kinds of statistics for teams and individual players, including information on the leaders in specific categories and which rookies are doing well. You can also monitor the All-Star voting ballots. Based on all this information, you can then decide whether you want to try to trade for another player through traditional means, which entails direct negotiation with another team, or take a less proactive approach by putting your players on the trading block to see what kinds of offers you'll receive from other teams. If you're playing with a top-notch team, these options are obviously not as enticing as they would be for a team that's down on its luck and trying to build a solid franchise, but over the course of the season, some of your players may fall victim to various injuries, forcing you to look for a suitable replacement if you don't have one on your bench.

At the end of a season in franchise mode, the league will hand out various awards, such as Rookie of the Year, Sixth Man, and Most Valuable Player, and it will also name its All-NBA first team, All-NBA second team, All-NBA third team, and All-NBA defensive team. More importantly, you'll also see which players are retiring and which players are eligible for free agency, two things that can really impact your team. If you don't feel like keeping or pursuing a high-priced free agent, you can focus all your attention on the draft, which allows you to get surprisingly detailed information on each player entering the draft, down to the player he most closely mimics in the NBA. If you want to get an even better idea of an individual rookie's skills, you can schedule workouts for prospective draftees, though the number of workouts you can hold is limited by the amount of money you're willing to spend on the draft process. Eventually, you'll reach a point in the off-season when you can start training players, and one of the more interesting aspects of this particular feature is that you can train a player in one of several different specific categories, ranging from post defense to perimeter offense. The whole off-season process can seem a little intimidating, but anyone who isn't willing to put up with the gobs of information being thrown around can let the computer do most of the work.

In fact, if you don't particularly care about constructing a franchise or you want to avoid off-season high jinks altogether, then NBA 2K3 offers several other modes to choose from. There's a street basketball option that allows you to play a game of two-on-two or five-on-five without any refs on some of the most well-known street courts in the country. It even lets you adjust the weather and the time of day, so you could play in a downpour in the middle of the night, if you were so inclined. There are also season, playoff, and tournament options, so you can play through a single season, jump right into the playoffs, or set up a custom tournament. NBA 2K3 also features a practice mode, in which you can hold a friendly scrimmage against another team, practice free throws, or get the timing down on your shots.

You'll have to brush up on your post-up game if you want to compete.

The PlayStation 2 version of the game offers online support right out of the box. Like its 2K3 brethren, NBA 2K3 provides information on the connection speed, win-loss record, and number of dropped games of every player online. Unfortunately, as of the time of this writing, the online play seems to suffer from some noticeable lag problems, even via a broadband connection. Even when you have a "great" connection to the opponent, according to the game, there's still a distinct chance that game will disconnect--though, neither player will be penalized in such instances. You'll probably be able to find a few matches that aren't too bad, but there are still several issues that need to be ironed out.

As fine-tuned as you think your stroke might be, it doesn't seem to matter sometimes in NBA 2K3. You'll undoubtedly vocalize your frustration when you see your star point guard miss three layups in a row or one of the best post-up men in the league miss three or four shots taken 5 feet away from the basket. This doesn't necessarily depend on whether the player in question is hot or cold, because your entire team seemingly goes cold at once. Incidentally, this particular problem mostly springs up when your team has pulled ahead, so in essence, it's the equivalent of the rubber-band AI used in some racing games--to keep the score close, the game puts an invisible handicap on your players. Unfortunately, that still doesn't explain why some shots don't go in even when the score is close. It would've been preferable to have the defending team step up its defense, but in this case, you'll simply miss shots that players in the real world would rarely miss.