Dick Vitale Basketball
Reviewed by Inkhands
The name of the game is Dick Vitale Basketball and it deals
with college basketball teams. As you can imagine from the
title Dick Vitale's voice can be heard throughout the game.
However, options allow you to choose just how much or how
little you listen to his commentary during the game. The
various degrees of speech from him are - small talk,
talkative, motormouth or you can choose to have none. If you
do leave it on, expect to hear the word baby a lot. As in -
"Incredible, baby", "Awesome, baby" and "That's
unbelievable, baby". So at least you do have the choice of
whether you want to hear him or not. That's a good option to have.
This game is for one or two players. There are three modes
of play in this game - a practice game, a tournament, and a
mode called 2 On 2 Slamfest.
Practice mode is just as it says. You pick a home team and a
visitor team and play one game. The 2 on 2 Slamfest is also
as it says - 2 players on a team against 2 players on
another one. The Playoffs only consist of 16 teams. A mode
this game is seriously lacking is a season mode.
The teams do not have names. You have about five conferences
to choose from. The teams are known only by their state. You
do have an option to rename the teams if you want to. You
can veiw the plays before, during, or after a game. There
are five offensive plays and five defensive plays. You can
have fouls on or off. You can have the music on or off. The
difficulty settings are - easy, normal, or hard. You can set
the speed of the game between slow, normal, fast, turbo,
maniac, or ludicrous. You can set the length of the half to
either 5, 10, 15, or 20 minutes.
The perspective in this game stays at court level, but at
the center of half court. It changes views when the
possession changes. The graphics are grainy and really not
that good. All the colors look dulled out. The sound is
adequate, but most likely you would rather turn the music
and the speech off. At that point all you can hear is the
bouncing of the basketball against the court.
As for the control - on offense you have one button for
passing, one button for shooting, and one button that allows
you to toggle between your offensive plays. As for defense
it's nearly the same. One button to try to steal the ball,
one for your defensive plays, and one to change to the
defender closest to the opponent with the ball. You can have
autoswitch defender on and still change defenders
manually. The plays are displayed in a little box in the top
left or right corner, depending on which team you are.
Challenge varies depending on the setting. Still it's about
average difficulty for a basketball game.
Fun Factor and Replay Value. This game isn't overly
enjoyable or overly addictive either. So the fun factor is
about average. As for the replayabiltiy of this game, there
are a lot of teams to choose from, even if there isn't any
visible difference between them. There are a lot of
different game settings though - difficulty, speed, and the
length of the game, which keeps this game as interesting the
second or third time through as the first.
Overall -
What's good about this game? Somewhat fun and the control is
good.
What's bad about this game? No season mode. Graphics aren't
that well done.
Bottom line - This game is average at best. Would I buy it?
No, but it is an okay diversion for an hour or two.
Graphics - 5/10
Sound - 5/10
Control - 8/10
Gameplay - 5/10
Fun Factor - 5/10
Replay Value - 5/10
Overall - 5/10
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