You know how they say you can’t eat 10 saltine crackers without water?
PlayStation 2
Released in 2002 by Activision
Grade: F
With the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise, Activision struck gold by pushing skateboarding to hyper-realistic levels. Street Hoops basically does the opposite, dumbing basketball down and squeezing all the life out of it.
Where it falls in the series
It’s the one and only.
Gripes
No surprise, this game came a year after the first NBA Street, a stylish, creative take on arcade basketball featuring basketball legends. This seems to be Activision’s attempt at capitalizing on the streetball trend, and it’s awful. There are no dynamics in the gameplay and the flavor is bland like a saltine cracker.
Where do we start? The players are beyond robotic. They start and stop on a dime. Defenders shadow their man like a literal shadow, always the same exact distance away from them. The goofy jukes either do nothing or completely remove the defender from the play. The shooting logic is extremely basic.
The presentation has one head-scratcher after another. The only thing unique about players is their cliche nicknames. Sometimes you can’t tell each team’s uniforms apart. Sometimes the ball is black, making it hard to see in the dark, muddy environments. The menus are taken straight from Tony Hawk, complete with a very familiar sound of a skidding skateboard.
Just skip this one, man.