College Hoops NCAA 2K8

The Good
Something changed when I turned 22. Although I’d played sports throughout my youth, I’d never really paid attention to them on TV. On a Friday afternoon in 1988 when my alma-mater was busy working its way to an unlikely NCAA tournament championship, I was at home crying because tournament coverage had pre-empted the weekly Legend of Zelda cartoon on the Super Mario Bros. Super Show. But by 2003 I was crying when Hakim Warrick blocked a game-tying three shot by Michael Lee in the finals to bring Syracuse its first national title, and screaming at the top of my lungs five years later when a similar game-tying shot went past the outstretched arms of Chris Douglas-Roberts, this time made, by Super Mario Chalmers to put the game into overtime, and ultimately give Kansas its third NCAA title to date.

Something else changed when I turned 30. For a few years, I’d tried to keep a weekly game going with my friends from high school that were in town, but at this point, many of them had moved on, and for those of us that hadn’t, the rough world of street ball had begun to take its toll in ways it hadn’t when we were teens. In that time, I’ve turned to the world of sports gaming to try and get my fix and my timing couldn’t have been better, or worse, depending on how you look at it.

In the twenty years between Kansas NCAA championships basketball games matured right along with me, and, on the college side at least, College Hoops 2k8 represents the ultimate end of that evolution. 2k8, more than any other game out there, captures the feel of the college game, such as motion offense, zone defense, and actually passing the ball, while still being highly playable, and providing those satisfying one-on-one, isolation dribble-drive moments that are the bread and butter of NBA games. You’re actually going to be rewarded in this game for working the ball around the perimeter, shifting the D, then driving in for a layup, or posting up and/or kicking out beyond the arc. Plays are easy to call up and are usually simple to execute. If you do screw up, though, you have to reset as your players don’t react too intelligently if something goes wrong. The end result being that, unless the play is a simple pick and roll, in general I’ve had more success making my own offense than using set plays.

The game looks pretty good, even if it’s obviously first gen for the PS3. The graphics themselves are kind of cartoony, in part because it’s an early game and in part because NCAA student-athletes can’t lend their likenesses to an effort like this. That said, cartoony graphics have aged better on older platforms, and they still look ok here, so in another 10 years, they will be more likely to stand up. The animation, on the other hand, is tops. Passing and shooting are crisp. When you know how the free-throw shooting works, the process becomes very intuitive thanks to those clean, well defined animations. The only thing that looks awkward at times is dunking. Sometimes the players take too many steps for the amount of room they have and seem to crash into the goal, while other times they take too few and are drawn to the rim as if magnetically attracted. The other occasional graphical glitch is sometimes the cloth effects on the shorts will go haywire and pull the shorts off and to the side, revealing that the players have less than a Ken doll below the belt.

Presentation is solid, though not as good as College Basketball 10 or NBA 2k11. The commentary is supplied by Vern Lundquist and Bill Raftery, and supported by Greg Gumble, Clark Kellogg, and Tracy Wolfson. Lundquist does a fine job, but Raftery always rubs me the wrong way.

College Hoops 2k8 offers an almost absurd level of customization to gamers. Not only can you create players and revise rosters to keep up with your favorite teams, but you can create new plays for your team, new chants for your school, and new schools altogether. The create-a-player mode provides a decent amount of variety in looks and tons of animation choices so that new players aren’t necessarily cutouts of one another, though there is a limit. The create a chant and create a play are a lot of fun, but you can’t or I haven’t figured out how to get custom plays into the Legacy Mode to actually try them out on real teams. Again, that’s probably my own ignorance, but the features are so cool that I can’t help but feel I’m missing out.

The Legacy Mode in 2k8 is the best I’ve seen anywhere. The experience feels truer and more complete than any other game out there. There are two flavors: open and career. In open mode, you’re free to choose any school to coach and modify anything about the players whereas career forces you to start with a no-name team and build from there, and limits you to changing a player’s cosmetics. You get an actual staff with two other coaches that help shape the resulting team through recruiting, scouting, and training. The recruiting process is comprehensive. You can start targeting players as earlier as their freshman year in high school and as late as their sophomore year of junior college. The recruiting includes attending amateur games throughout the summer as well. Playing those games is rather tedious, but it does reward you somewhat. After each game you play to completion, you’ll get 40 extra recruiting points and have a portion of the stats revealed for each player of each team. Plus, the more amateur games you attend, the more likely a recruit is to sign with you. An easy way around the tedium is to play two minute games (one minute is the half minimum), but with strategic fouling, you’re still looking at five minutes a game minimum.

Recruits will have three weighted priorities that determine their behavior such as playing time, proximity to home, and quality of coaching and a list of top 5 schools they’re interested in. Targeting recruits whose strengths you play to is best. The other thing is to be realistic. You’ll have a difficult time sneaking in underneath anyone else if you aren’t at or near the top of that recruit’s list unless they sign a better player in that position or don’t have a scholarship to offer that player. The common complaint with the recruiting is that signing All-Americans can be too difficult, but it’s really a matter of understanding the system. Just because you’re Duke, Ohio State, or Kentucky doesn’t mean that you’ll automatically have a recruit’s attention. You have to have the PT to offer or be in the right place. Don’t be discouraged if you miss out on a player during the early signing period. You can generally pick up solid players in the late period, and the months between where you can’t sign give you the chance to feel out new talent. All in all, the level of customization, in depth Legacy Mode, and solid gameplay aren’t combined in any other ball game, college or otherwise, out there.

The Bad
College Hoops 2k8 wasn’t my first choice in when I raided the bargain bin at my local game store to try and find a good college ball game. The first one that really kept my attention was NCAA March Madness 06 (for the PS2), then College Basketball 10 because, unlike 2k8, they were both easy to pick up and play. For whatever reason, as a novice I found the control scheme of 2k8 very challenging. The controller layout felt awkward. I always wanted to do my dribble moves on the right stick (per EA’s games), and shoot with the [] button. I couldn’t get the timing right for the Sixaxis free throw shooting. I couldn’t consistently post up, and still can’t, so I’d end up turning the ball over for no reason whatsoever when trying to back down an opponent in the low post. EA’s games didn’t have these problems, so they were my refuge until I finally got fed up with them. Why? Because despite the things I like about College Basketball 10, you can’t pass the ball in that game without turning it over. In a twenty-minute game, you’d likely have just as many TOs. No matter how well the motion offense and post-up moves capture the feel of the college game, if you can’t pass the ball up court on a break, or dribble-drive in the lane, you can’t win, let alone have any fun.

Frustrated on all fronts, I turned to the dark side: NBA 2k11, and saw what a basketball game should be. So why am I here to sing the praises of an outdated college game that I didn’t like when I tried it? Well, for one, once I got a handle on the NBA 2k11 controls, the 2k8 controls began to make sense to me and two, NBA 2k11 also reminds me of everything I hate about the (real) NBA game compared college ball. Everything in the game is based on timing and animation, so hitting a free throw or a three-pointer is really just a matter of flicking your wrist or releasing the shot stick at the right point in the player’s motion (with a little stats based randomness for fun and frustration). This isn’t explained anywhere in the game or the woefully thin manual that accompanies it, so I don’t know how anyone figured that out. Working backwards, however, I was able to see how 2k8 works, even if the scheme isn’t as refined as it is in NBA 2k11. Long story short, it’s a shame that companies gave up on creating new college games given the enormous leaps made by 2k Sports in the past three years.

There are a few other problems with the game. As I mentioned, running plays is a little too difficult because as soon as anything goes even slightly wrong, the rest of your team just gives up and stands around. The computer, or course, doesn’t have this problem, so you can see that the plays work well when well executed. This is one area where College Basketball 10 is really superior. In that game, you can call different motion sets at the tap of a button, and players will continue to try and execute them even if you don’t hit every mark perfectly. This leaves 2k8 in a kind of awkward in between the NBA style where no one runs plays, and college ball, where running motion sets is really important. The other problem is that all teams appear to use the same playbook unless you take the time to customize them. It undermines the value of having so many teams when UConn and Arizona play exactly the same. This gets exacerbated as you turn up the difficulty because that just seems to make opposing teams never miss shots. At MOP level, you’ll have as much trouble with Alcorn State as you will UCLA.

You’ll also find in this game that it’s too easy to get steals, especially against the computer. With a good team, I was able to get nearly as many steals as I did rebounds, even after adjusting my sliders down a bit. While picking off the occasional inbound pass feels awesome, it’s a bore to steal ten per game. The other defensive glitch is with blocking. There are certain points where it’s impossible to not get your shot blocked regardless of the talent of your shooter or the lack thereof in the defender, and the sliders don’t seem to make any difference with it. The infuriating thing, though, is that sometimes defenders will block shots in an illegal or impossible fashion, such as swatting through the hoop or coming through the backboard itself. Nothing feels worse than having an open look get batted back by a defender with his hands through the net. At that point you feel cheated. There are a few other things that are uneven, such as the computer frequently stepping on the backcourt line, but seldom getting called for over-and-back, or the way the computer tends to rally with an improbable series of threes during the latter portion of the second half. These problems are mostly minor, though, and don’t impact the overall enjoyment.

Although the presentation is fairly good, there are a number of quibbles there as well. The character models for the College Hoops Tonight segments are so stiff and unreal that they’re quite creepy. The chatter between Lundquist and Raftery can be inane at times, and they frequently get numbers wrong, such as saying my team was down by six when we just went up three. Likewise, it’s clear that they only recorded some of the phrases the announcers use once because Raftery always says man-to-man like it’s a monosyllabic word.

The Bottom Line
There will be great rejoicing in the world of college hoops whenever 2K sports can get it together and figure out a way to make a college game that can be profitable, but in the meantime, this isn’t a poor way to make due. In fact, if it weren’t for NBA 2k11, you’d never know you were really missing out.