Planned additions include a dunk contest and a three-point contest. At launch, NBA Playgrounds will offer tournament modes for offline and online play, in addition to one-off exhibition games. You also earn experience for individual players, which gradually unlocks new moves like dunk animations. Saber Interactive/Mad Dog GamesĮach of the 30 NBA teams has at least three active players, plus retired athletes, and Saber aims to add hundreds more in post-release updates. (If hearing about virtual card packs sets off alarm bells in your head, don’t fret: There are no microtransactions in NBA Playgrounds, although Karch said that if there’s a demand for the ability to buy card packs, Saber can always add that feature later.) Magic, Shaq, Wilt and Pau lace up their sneakers for a night game in Paris. The game’s progression mechanic is focused on unlocking the entire roster gradually - you start with three card packs, which give you five players each, and you earn a new pack each time you level up. Saber will launch NBA Playgrounds with a roster of more than 150 NBA athletes, including current players such as LeBron James and Kawhi Leonard as well as retired legends like Karl Malone and Patrick Ewing. It will debut with two-player head-to-head play online, with four-player support coming soon in an “early update.” The studio has big plans for post-release content additions, including roster updates. Another boost puts star icons in various locations on the court if you score from those spots, a multiplier will double, triple or even quadruple your point value.Īs a two-on-two game, NBA Playgrounds can be played by four people in the same room. One of them is actually a debuff for your opponents rather than a boost for you: Their shot clock runs twice as fast, giving them only six seconds instead of the game’s usual 12. But as you sink baskets and play good defense, you’ll build a Lottery Pick meter that, once full, will give you a random special ability for a limited time. Whatever happened to the arcade-style sports video game?Īs far as arcade basketball games go, NBA Playgrounds doesn’t have something as splashy as NBA Street’s “Gamebreaker” mechanic or as iconic as NBA Jam’s “on fire” feature. One option that didn’t exist back in the day in NBA Jam is a crossover dribble move, which is controlled by the right analog stick. On the Xbox One, where my demo was, the A button passes and the X button shoots, while the right trigger controls sprinting on defense, X attempts a steal, B does a shove and Y jumps. The controls for everything are simple and easy to grasp. Certain NBA stars tagged as “epic players” have unique dunk animations. Right after my Griffin-to-Hill alley-oop, Karch came back down the court for a dunk in which the Chicago Bulls’ Dwyane Wade spun like the Tasmanian Devil while flying toward the basket. Karch told me that there are over 300 different dunks in NBA Playgrounds, and they’re exactly the kind of physics-defying thing you remember from previous arcade basketball games. Even the animations for actions like jumping to contest a shot evoke the ’90s arcade classic from Midway.Īnd boy, those dunks. If you shoot while sprinting toward the hoop, your player will attempt a dunk. For example, you can swipe at the ball to try to steal it from an opponent, or simply shove the player to knock it loose (as long as you’ve got some of your sprint meter left). The action ends up playing out very similarly to NBA Jam on both offense and defense. Indeed, NBA Playgrounds is a two-on-two experience à la NBA Jam, rather than NBA Street’s three-on-three setup. Can indie sports games fill the gaps that EA and 2K Sports have left open?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |