My favorite Games of All-Time #19: NBA Street - Originally published on 1UP - April 7, 2006

NBA Street by Electronic Arts BIG is the only "sport" game on my list. The snowboarding game SSX is the cornerstone for EA's Big division, NBA Street serves as the ambassador between "extreme" sports and traditional sports.

NBA Street meets just about all of the criteria in my definition of a great game. It is the self-contained, boiled-down basketball experience. Don't confuse the popularity of the NBA with the actual game of basketball.

Playground basketball is possibly the last pure form of sport that I know of. Yes companies like AND1 have built their rep by taking playground tricks into large arenas. The game itself is best enjoyed on the playground, free from sponsorships and advertising. The playground where the real legends play day in and day out for the love of the game.

As far as videogames go the basic components for basketball are 3-on-3. This is until the industry learns the nuances of the 1-on-1 game, which NBA Ballers completely misses.

NBA Street was the first basketball game in a long time to capture the fun and creative freedom of basketball. It was arcade in almost every sense of the word. Plays, tricks and dunks were exaggerated but believable. If a character didn't have a high enough "handle" rating they could easily lose the basketball if trying to do a fancy trick move. This gave the fictional and real players in the game a sense of balance.

The control scheme was easy to pick up and get used to. Within a few minutes you could begin pulling off crazy tricks like it was second nature. Not unlike the other great combination-building trick system in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. NBA Street rewarded players that figured out how to string together long trick chains ending in a monstrous dunk. The sense of realism, the "attitude" that the industry is always trying to create felt genuine in this game.

NBA Street is a nod to the playground game and the legends that never made it into the league. While there are some big NBA names in the game, the biggest personality was the fictional main character, the afro-sporting "Stretch" Monroe. Stretch is based on the NYC playground legends of the 60's and 70's. Many consider those decades the golden years of playground basketball. The days where the best in the NBA would actually show and prove in the playgrounds every summer, instead of retreating to their palatial estates in the Hamptons. The other fictional characters in the game are based around modern players or, like Japanese center Takashi, foreign players that were never given a chance to enter the NBA.

I consider the original Street superior in concept and execution than the sequels. NBA Street 2 and 3 showed an improvement in the graphics and control. Unfortunately those games lacked soul. They lacked originality. They played as uninspired sequels featuring a number of NBA Legends in addition to modern players. They followed a formula of "more is better" rather than the bare bones actual heart of the game.

The fictional legends that gave the original game so much personality now seemed out of place. Stretch served little purpose as his template, the retro afro-sporting Julius "Dr. J" Erving was also a playable character. To add insult to injury EA also began using relatively unknown playground players as the templates for fictional characters and unfairly compensating them for their motion-capture sessions, likeness and moves. EA Sports Big have built enough revenue for the company that they began exploring other licenses to make Street games around.

By the time NBA Street 3 debuted it had become a gross exaggeration of the original game. Players could do ridiculous moves that even the Harlem Globetrotters would be embarrassed to do and enter dunk contests with moon-like physics.

Lest we forget, the moment that Midway gave us a "lot more of the same" in NBA Jam it just about buried the franchise. Half court dunks, bobble-head players, catching fire and unbalanced gameplay. Yeah, it is very easy to take a good idea and push it too far.

NBA Street has been buried. The whole concept of "street" goes out the window when the license and the names are pushed over the game. EA has destroyed a good thing. But for what it's worth the original NBA Street will always remain in my top-20.

To read more on the bigger picture of streetball, where it's been and where it's going check out my 4-part series from ages ago. Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4. EDIT: I am trying to see if I have saved this series so I can repost it.

I’d like to hear your personal top-10, top-20, top fighting games, top sports games, or top games in any genre. Let me know in the comments section please. As always if you would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!