Is NBA 2K17 a good choice for basketball fearing FIFA and PES fans?

I’m a big football fan. If you’re reading this as an American (which you might be given this is an NBA 2K17 article), that’s soccer. I play FIFA and PES most years. I’ve been a football fan for 25 years and games have been part of my life for even longer, so there’s absolutely no barrier to entry with those games. NBA is a different matter. I was forced to play basketball at school, but never got into it, despite the fact that it’s fast paced and high scoring. So, with NBA 2K17 widely regarded as one of the best sports sims on the market, can someone like me get anything from it? I took to NBA 2K17 to find out.

To be completely open, here’s what I think I know about basketball:

• Michael Jordan was very good but is now retired
• Travelling is bad
• Slam dunks are good
• Layups are good
• Shaq was very good but is now retired
• 2 points for a basket made from inside the end zone bit
• 3 points for a basket made from outside the end zone bit
• It pays to be a giant
• BASEketball is a good film
• Larry Bird is a man who I think was a basketball player
• Space Jam is about an intergalactic basketball tournament
• One of the NBA games on PlayStation had a rubber cover, which was cool

There’s probably more, but that’s everything that came to mind after about five minutes. I fired straight into MyCareer mode (well, I did create a character using face scan on my phone, but the less said about that the better – OK, fine, it made a more handsome, rugged, muscular version of me that I’m now jealous of and resent despite the fact he’s not real. I even tried to ugly him up by adding skin pocks and visible skin damage, but he’s just too damn handsome. Even his tiny @VGTomO sized mouth works on his virtual face. Life isn’t fair!) and this is where the problems started.

NBA 2K17 has a tutorial mode (2KU – something we’ll get to later), but I wanted to see how accessible the game is to someone who knows the absolute basics and is generally a sports fan. The answer, found within the opening screens of MyCareer was: it isn’t. For one, I don’t know what the positions are. Center looked good as all the examples were about 7 feet tall, and one of the other options featured what were practically dwarves at just over 6 feet! The options for my archetype weren’t any better. One was Glass Cleaner (although I did live in a pub as a child, so could relate) and another Paint Protector, which sounds like the kind of job everyone wants when applying for a role at B&Q (or Home Depot if you’re still an American). I didn’t know what either of those meant, so opted for Post Scorer as there are posts in football, and you can score goals off them. Sorted! Back of the net!

In truth the entire setup was a bit like my French GCSE exam. I didn’t know what I was doing. I ended up acing my exam (somehow), so perhaps the same would be true in NBA 2K17. We were about to find out. Finally I set my player number, something I presumed I couldn’t get wrong. I picked 34.

Straight off the bat (cricket, not baseball for those wondering), MyCareer mode seemed interesting. There was an intro by a player* I recognised but couldn’t name (I’m sure he was in a film or TV show recently) and a man who I’m pretty positive is Michael B. Jordan from Creed. So, more or less as if FIFA opened with an intro from David Beckham and Tom Hardy. A short montage of me as a player was followed by a choice of college. I had no clue so based my decision entirely on the logo and theme song.

The Georgetown Hoyas, to my ears, have a slightly comical sounding tune, which I approved of, but their logo is just a big capital G. Even the font is basic. So they were out. I was then drawn to the Michigan State Spartans. Their logo, as expected, is a Spartan helmet, and their tune is suitably dramatic, bringing about a sense of impending conflict. The Spartans were for me, their entire image speaking directly to my soul.

What happened next might be normal for US sports fans, but to me, a person who is used to seeing half naked overweight men shouting obscenities from the crowd in mid-winter, it was more than a little odd. The Spartans’ court had a video played onto it, making it look as though the floor was collapsing, then half the crowd proceeded to perform a dance routine from their seats. It was… surreal… kind of how I imagine a basketball game might kick off if it had been turned into a Broadway musical.

Once the game proper started I realised I was in way over my head. Heading straight into MyCareer without doing any tutorials is a bad idea. Don’t do it. Without knowing how to do any of the moves all I could do was attempt 3-pointers from distance, which actually worked pretty well. The Spartans won the first practice game, but then form dropped dramatically. I played through until the draft (something that I don’t understand and probably never will, but it kind of seemed like how I remember picking football teams at school during lunch break). My man got picked 16th, which may or may not mean anything, but considering my ranking in games was never better than a ‘C’, I was happy with it.

At this point in the game’s story I got picked to play for USA in a game against Australia, which was odd given how poorly I’d played all season, but I assume has to happen in the script. I could sense I was out of my depth, not only in terms of who big man Orry was playing alongside, but also in terms of having signed for a proper NBA team despite not knowing what all the buttons did. It was time to get some help.

2KU is NBA 2K17’s tutorial mode, and it’s excellent. It teaches you what everything does as you play a friendly game against the AI. Quick note: it’s surprising how different the whole game feels when you are in charge of the whole team and not just a single player. I found playing as one man during MyCareer to be pretty tough, but switching around from player to player (like what happens in pretty much every sports game) took things up a few notches.

This might sound like the ramblings of a mad man, but hear me out. In FIFA and PES you change players all the time, when passing and receiving a ball, or when you are defending and want to control someone else. Football is a slow game, though, in comparison to basketball. There’s also a lot of space and time. Basketball is fast, there’s no space, and blink and the other team have scored. This translates to a game that feels so frenetic it’s hard to get into the swing of things.

Offensive play is easy to get to grips with (although I’m a long way from mastering it), but defending is and will probably remain an issue for me. This may well come from a lack of understanding of the sport’s player positions, but I’m constantly getting turned by the man I’m meant to be marking and tackling seems near impossible. Maybe that’s the point, given that basketball seems to be an offensively focused sport. Or maybe I’m just really bad at this game.

A day or so later and I’m kind of into NBA 2K17. As a sports sim it genuinely seems like a highly polished and complex game, one that I expect fans will adore. As someone on the outside hoping to get in, I’m currently stood inside the porch, but not inside the main door. I’m going to get inside one day, though. Not in a home invasion kind of way, but in a welcoming “Hi there, come in and eat our lovely NBA flavoured dinner with us. It’s lovely.” And I’ll have earned it.

I feel as though I’ve let Tom Orry, the 7-foot hunk, down. He was a gifted athlete, also blessed with gorgeous hair and massive feet. In MyCareer he was on the path to becoming an All-Star, but little did he know that the real life Tom Orry couldn’t even press the right button to jump for the ball at the start of a match (the toss off?). He didn’t go on to greatness, but I’m hopeful that one day his clones will. Clones that will get increasingly less attractive.

* I was later told that this man is in fact Kobe Bryant, one of the most famous players of all time. He played for the LA Lakers for the entirety of his NBA career, is an 18-time All-Star, and a 15-time member of the All-NBA Team. He’s a big deal. I hadn’t seen him in a film or TV show. He is in fact on the cover of NBA 2K17 Legend Edition, the game I was playing and writing about.