In the last few years we have seen how Microsoft has released a variety of games from different genres in their attempt of getting into the gaming market. I think they have done a great job so far, their “Madness” series of racing games is a good example of that.

In the other hand we can’t say their line of sports games has been brilliant. NBA Full Court Press, the first basketball game they released, just couldn’t keep up with the competition, it’s graphics and gameplay were way inferior to those of NBA Live.

However, a couple of months ago Microsoft released NBA Inside Drive 2000, according to what they said before the official release of the game, they didn’t want to compete directly with EA Sports (which is currently the king of sports games, but, who doesn’t know that!), instead they have focused in bringing people a good game with outstanding gameplay for only 20 bucks, cool huh? But, is the game any good? Let’s find out…

Graphics

Maybe on par with NBA Live 99 graphics, we can say High Voltage software (the developers of the game, Microsoft is the publisher actually) has done a really good job with them, overall they look very clean.

Players look very detailed, in fact, I don’t think you will have a problem recognizing Reggie Miller or Shaquille O ‘Neal, since the faces are digitized. Also the motion of the players has been captured completely, I mean, movements are pretty life-like, you can really feel you are playing basketball. The arenas look very nice as well and although the crowd is totally static it looks good.

Inside Drive 2000 supports Direct3D acceleration, which is a must for today’s games. The menu for setting graphical options was very complete; you could turn off shadows and extra lightning effects that could improve your performance if you don’t have a very fast system.

Also you can go as high as 1024x768 resolution, I tested the game with a Matrox G400 card and I had no problems running with all features turned on.

 

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