Boo-ya!

ESPN NBA 2Night

NBA Shootout 2001

$39.99

ESPN NBA 2Night

$49.99

NBA Live 2001

$39.99

One thing about the NBA Playoffs is, no matter how much you hate the Lakers or Sixers or Hornets or whomever, if you've got the right tools, you can always take out your frustrations on 'em in the cyber arena. My living room has been a house of horrors this week for the San Antonio Spurs, who have been repeatedly schooled by Michael Finley, Dirk Nowitski, and a fiery Dallas Mavericks team eager to gain revenge for their recent playoff loss.

Before you can implement this sort of tonic for a bruised soul, though, you gotta have game. Real game. Not a Sean Elliott-type B-game; a real, top-notch A-game like Vince Carter or (I hate to say it) Allen Iverson.

This year, Sony's 989 Sports rockets past a crop of pretenders with NBA Shootout 2001, easily the crown jewel of the 2001 hoops class. Rock-solid and grounded in the basics, NBA Shootout 2001 plays like the old Celtics of the Eighties, not always flashy, bells and whistles kept to a minimum, but amazingly consistent and reliable to the point of greatness.

The temptation among makers of NBA games is to follow the NBA Jam school of cartoon idolatry or to focus so much on the graphics that gameplay becomes sluggish. The latter is the case with Konami's new PlayStation2 franchise, NBA 2Night, which inherits many of the problems of their In the Zone series. ESPN's Stuart Scott delivers the color commentary with his trademark calls of "boo-ya!" and "on a roll like butta!" but unfortunately the game winds up looking more like the butta's on the playing surface, as a wild variety of built-in moves sends the players careening every which way, taking the control out of the hands of the gamer. The players and arenas are nicely detailed, but the game is simply an untameable beast, and the keypad configuration is a nightmare.

A similar, out-of-control "NBA on Ice" aesthetic has always plagued Electronic Arts' NBA Live series, and NBA Live 2001 is no exception. Whereas some of the previous versions were woefully lacking in defense, the same can't be said for 2001. Instead, the holdup is at the offensive end, as everything is either an awkward jumper that looks like the players are shooting a bowling ball, or a gravity-defying NBA Jam-style "boom shaka-laka" dunk, and the game's commentary is about as graceful as a Chris Dudley free throw. Still, Live gets mad props for its unbelievable player selection -- featuring All-Star teams from the Fifties through the Nineties -- and for its bonus features. The ever-popular 3-point shootout is here, as is a one-on-one streetball mode that gives you the chance to create such dream matchups as Bob Cousy vs. John Stockton or Wilt Chamberlain vs. Shaquille O'Neal, or, best of all, to school Bill Walton repeatedly with whomever you last heard him dissing on NBC. While there's definitely something to be said for that, it does run its course eventually.

Which brings us all back, again and again, to NBA Shootout 2001, where the gameplay is amazingly fluid, keypad controls are simple and natural, and defense isn't a dirty word. This game's as smooth as a Larry Bird baseline fadeaway. As Stuart Scott says, "Cool as the other side of the pillow!"