How so? I had it in my hand for $30 but put it back. Figured I may pick it up later this week.....
If you're buying it for the Wii, it's worth full purchase price for the controls alone. That's definitely half the fun of the Wii version. It's still worth the price of purchase really for the 360 and PS3...it's little things about the in-game mechanics that annoy me more than anything else. As someone who logged hundreds of hours in the original and TE, there are little gameplay flaws that irk the hell out of me, like...
-Console specific content. WHY must they continue to do this? Why can't they just release the same game for the Wii, the 360 and the PS3 without worry of the fact that certain teams are only available on certain consoles?
-Unbalanced computer assistance in peer to peer play. It tends now to penalize the winning team more than benefit the losing team. The winning team can't make their shots, but at the same time, the defensive team don't benefit from the computer helping them score, nor do they have any heightened defensive awareness...so if there's a 30 point difference in score, it's just as hard to come back as without CPU assistance. You can tell it's there because the computer sure benefits from CPU assistance, but your friends don't if they suck. You also cannot turn CPU assistance off because...
-No gameplay options. You can't change quarter lengths, CPU assistance, etc etc or modify gameplay in the slightest outside of difficulty. This is the barest of bones in terms of actual gameplay options. I was really surprised to see this.
-Awkward controls for 360 that you cannot customize. Again, this is specific to the 360 since the Wii controls are in an awesomeness class of their own and I haven't played it on the PS3. Every sports game since 1996 has placed turbo controls on the top right side of the controller, but this one goes top left, and then doesn't allow you to change them for your comfort. The shoot and pass buttons are also transposed from the norm of old games (this again normally isn't an issue if you have the option to change controls,) and we found a few people were still jumping on defense when they meant to try to steal because it was what they were used to from past games.
-Poor defensive mechanics. Compared to the originals, it's way too easy to steal a ball, way too unforgiving to shove (basically, if you miss a shove, there's no recovery and an automatic free shot for the offence.) The difference between goaltending and blocking is just as inconsistent though, and must be the hardest thing in the world to get 100%, so I don't fault them for this.
Still, everything else is great. The graphics are great, the sounds are great (even if you'll probably have gone through the majority of Tim Kitzrow's one liners and speeches after 2 or 3 games,) and it's still fun as hell when you're playing with buddies. I think EA realizes that they don't quite have a full retail game's worth of time and options put into this, which is why the shelf price is 20-30% lower than a regular game.
As a side note, it would have been primo if EA bought NBA Jam out of Midway's bankruptcy sale and hidden the old versions as-is (or done like they did with Madden 20th Anniversary and put a playable version of a previous version with the current players) which would'v