I have nothing against the PS3 launch titles. I could play Fight Night or Resistance till my thumbs fell off. That said, I was starting to get jealous of all the games showing up for the other next-gen machines. Well, the second wave of PS3 titles has hit and while it wasn't quite the tsunami gamers might have been hoping for, it did deliver some quality stuff. Right up along with Virtua Fighter 5 is NBA Street Homecourt. EA's first trip back to the blacktop in two years is an impressive one. Street vets may be let down by the slim variety of game modes, but the additions to the series will put a smile on the face of anyone who's ever dreamed of rattling a rim.

Thanks to the power of your $600 monster, it's no surprise that this is the nicest-looking street to date. The cartoony look of past games has been replaced by more photo-realistic action. Framerate is solid and even when things got intense, there was none of the occasional stuttering that I saw in the 360 version (I guess that's what that extra coupla hundred bucks buys). The animations are all distinct, so it's worth your while to dig deep into the game and the controls to come up with things you've never seen before.

Of course, that'll mean learning a whole new set of controls. In an odd twist, the right stick -- which has evolved into the key controller element in most sports titles -- has been just about phased out. You use it to pass the ball to a teammate when you want to retain control of the passer. That's it. If you've spent the past couple of years right-stick tricking your way through V3, you'll have to unlearn some skills or you're going to be whipping your Sixaxis against the wall. The practice mode will help you get a feel for the new lay-out, but you'll still need to put in a mess of three-on-three minutes before you'll feel totally comfortable.


What hasn't changed is the basic goal of the game -- fill up your Gamebreaker meter. Once it's maxed out, the Earth's gravitational pull on your players becomes even less of a hindrance. Sadly, while the dunks you get to make are a treat for the eyes, the cueing up of Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" every time you go into Gamebreaker mode will bum out your ears. I also wasn't all that impressed with the ball-handling tricks during the Gamebreakers. At worst, they look like bad break-dancing moves from an '80s hip-hip documentary. At best, they kind of look like some Capoeira moves that Eddy Gordo might bust out on a Tekken foe.

Helping you get to fill up your Gamebreaker meter and letting you do all sorts of absolutely nutty stuff on the court is the new Trick Remixer. Using the Square and Triangle buttons in combination with the R1 and R2 gives you an almost limitless number of tricks to perform. And once you get the feel for things, you'll hardly miss any real right stick functionality.

Happily, you don't need to constantly be in Gamebreaker mode -- and listening to Herbie Hancock -- to witness some of Homecourt's coolest moves. New this time around are the double dunk, where if you time your move correctly, your man will grab the ball as it's going through the hoop the first time and send it back for a second time. During a Gamebreaker, you can actually pull off a triple dunk. Maybe even cooler, though, are the jump-off dunks. Here, one of your guys will drop to the ground at the top of the key and let you use him as a launching pad to jump off for the dunk.