FirstCuts: Hoops 2K8 ‘Drops it Like it’s Hot’

By Chris Littmann
Sports don’t start and end with a referee’s whistle. FirstCuts, a blog dedicated to sports culture, will cover everything outside the lines, from the games to the gear. Look for expanded FirstCuts content after the New Year.
OK, college football is ready for a break. Nothing says “momentum†like a few weeks off. What on earth are you going to do with all this free time? Embrace college basketball season and pick up College Hoops 2K8.
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I’ve always preferred the 2K offerings to the ones from EA, at least when it comes to college hoops -- don’t even get me started on the whole exclusive NFL licensing issue between EA and 2K. But after being a total fiend for College Hoops 2K6, I was disappointed with 2K7. But I see some major steps forward. Let’s get into the good and bad of this season’s offering:
GRAPHICS: It doesn’t take much to make everything look shiny and pretty on the next-gen consoles. In my case, I demoed this game on the Xbox 360. Like pretty much everything on a high-def TV, this game looks slick. Because you can’t license college athletes the way you can with pros, you aren’t going to get exact facial representations of guys, but there will be players who look an awful lot like familiar faces you know from the college game. It delivers what you’d expect in terms of next-gen looks.
My only beef with the graphics comes in the details -- particularly if you favor playing with a smaller school outside the big six conferences. I dialed up my alma mater, Ohio University, and for the zillionth year in a row, there are little things around the arena that aren’t right. I don’t claim to know how game development works, but you’d think they would’ve nailed the larger arenas by now, and taken some time to tweak the details in the smaller ones. It’s really a minor nit-pick in an otherwise awesome looking game.
GAMEPLAY: The folks at 2K are putting an emphasis on three features: Maximum Passing, PlayVision and Lock-On D.
Let me start with what I’m loving, and that’s Lock-On D. It sort of replaces the old defensive slide functionality. An icon appears, and you’re able to hold (on the Xbox 360) the left trigger. That will lock your man onto the ballhandler. It’s effective, just be ready for when they pull up for jumpers; it won’t block the shot for you.
PlayVision works reasonably well when you face the computer, but I took a quick stroll online and tried to run plays. Now the whole convenience of this feature is supposed to be that it tells you where to go on the floor for your plays with step-by-step instructions. That’s fine, but online players are a little savvier, and I found myself giving up a lot of turnovers. Things just developed too slowly against solid online opponents.
Maximum Passing is useful, in that it’s frustrating to throw a bounce pass into traffic when a lob is needed, but on the fly I found myself defaulting to regular passing. As I played more, I got used to using the maximum passing options, but that’s more because I constantly want to showoff for the ladies, throwing a lot of alley-oops. (What do you mean throwing alley-oops on a video game doesn’t impress girls? Have I been misled?)
As far as other parts of the gameplay, you’ve got your standard modes -- tournaments, legacies and single games. Verne Lundquist, Bill Raftery and Tracy Wolfson deliver the action. Just be prepared for Raftery to say “drop it like it’s hot.†I had to pause the game because I was laughing so hard.
ODDS AND ENDS: Kudos to 2K for some of the music choices -- particularly The Kooks -- but I still give the EA games an edge in the soundtrack department. I found myself just playing my own music.
My absolute favorite feature is the 2K Share function. In the past, you’ve had to go through the tedious task of entering names manually if you wanted announcers to say the proper ones. But with 2K share, you can let someone else do the work. Rosters are readily available for download, and it takes care of the ridiculous painstaking task of typing with a console controller.
The 6th-Man Advantage feature, as well as the All-American Training (against the likes of Greg Oden and others) are highlighted, but didn’t excite me as much as some of the other shiny new toys in this one.
OVERALL: It feels like an upgrade from 2K7. That’s because it is. Assuming you’re as nauseated as I am by all the BCS talk at this point, go pick up a game where champions are actually determined by the players.
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Chris Littmann is an associate editor for Sporting News and writes the Mid-major report for SportingNews.com. He will run you off the court if you challenge him in the comment section.
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