Interview: 9 New Features In NBA 2K10

TGIP:  Hi everyone, we’re here with NBA 2K10 lead designer Erick Boenisch to talk about some of the new features that the latest iteration of the series brings to the table.  Erick, thanks for being with us.

EB:  No problem.

1.  “Social Networking” Statistical Ratings

TGIP:  The NBA recently put the kibosh on tweeting and other forms of social networking during games, and team owners are making sure that their players are aware of the pitfalls of this new phenomenon.  This isn’t your daddy’s NBA, is it?

EB:  No sir, and 2K Sports is right there with “Social Networking” statistical ratings.

TGIP:  Explain to me how that works.

EB:  It’s like any other statistic.  Three point shooting, shot blocking, they’re all measured on a 1-100 scale, and this will be no different.

TGIP:  What’s the benefit of having a high “Social Networking” rating?

EB:  Well, for one thing, you won’t leave suicide messages on your Twitter and get sent to rehab.

TGIP:  Ouch.

EB:  Yeah.  A player with a higher rating will be less likely to lower team morale by complaining about team chemisty on his Twitter, blasting the general manager on his blog, or by posting a photo of himself wherein two hash bricks are leaning against his passenger-side door.

TGIP:  That sounds like a blast.  What is Shaquille O’Neal’s SN rating?

EB:  100, baby.  He’s the standard by which all others are measured.  Others with high ratings are Chris Bosh, Baron Davis…

TGIP:  What is Starbury’s rating?

EB:  12 out of a possible 100.

TGIP:  Really?

EB:  Oh, I’m sorry.  I was looking at the wrong column, that’s his 2-point field goal rating.

2.  Shaquille O’Neal Intellectual Property Theft Mode

TGIP:  What else do you have for us?

EB:  Well, we figured it would be fairly easy to model plagiarism, so we did that with “IP Theft Mode”, where teammates chemistry can suddenly drop when one makes a television show out of an idea the other had, and claims it was his idea.

TGIP:  And how does that effect gameplay?

EB:  It shows up in Association mode.  Team chemistry will plunge if you don’t do something to resolve the rift.

TGIP:  And how do you do that?

EB:  You get a menu option where you can either give the guy a producer credit or tell him to f— himself.

3.  Enhanced Training/Rehab Options

TGIP:  There seems to be a lot of depth to Association mode in this iteration, more than ever before.

EB:  Yeah- you will really feel like you are running the team, right down to managing how your stars come back from major injuries.  We’ve added a lot of depth this year…players even have “signature” training methods that have greater effects than the standard.

TGIP:  For example?

EB:  Well, Gilbert Arenas can train or rehab by sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber or oxygen tent.  That’s his signature menu choice.  He has other options too, like swimming, calisthenics, the treadmill, no-contact drills…you can micromanage every aspect of his recovery. 

TGIP:  Awesome!  His knee will finally be 100%.

EB:  Nope.

TGIP:  Any other signature choices?

EB:  Yao Ming has a choice unique only to him where he trains by taking nonstop 16 hour flights and getting worked to death by the Chinese National Team.  It actually WORSENS injuries.

TGIP:  Why would you choose it?

EB:  The game chooses it for you.

4.  CAPBLASTER! Minigame

TGIP:  I heard a rumor that you guys added some Easter Eggs this year.

EB:  (laughs) Yeah, you caught us.  If you hit a certain combination of buttons you can play “CAPBLASTER!”, a bullet-hell game featuring Rip Hamilton.  You control a $34,000,000 ship and every time some cap space floats onto the screen, you blast it to smithereens. 

TGIP:  What other features does Rip’s ship have?

EB:  If you hit circle, it plays a recording of him saying “Me, ref?”  The ship also has a special attack where it sulks if the 2P ship is getting most of the action.

TGIP:  Who is the 2P ship?

EB:  Kenyon Martin.

TGIP:  Old-school graphics…but why a space game?

EB:  It’s not science fiction- it’s an actual representation of the technology we’ll have access to by the time the Pistons are any good again.

5.  Delonte West Offseason Mode

TGIP:  Any new modes to tell us about?

EB:  Yeah- we’re branching out.  I can’t say too much about this one, but here’s a screenshot:

TGIP:  Let’s move on.

EB:  Yeah, I’m not sure that will make the final game, you know?

6.  Quitting On The Coach Option

TGIP:  Yes, back to basketball.  I heard a rumor of team-specific menu commands.

EB:  That rumor is a bit overblown- there’s really only one unique option and it’s for one team in particular.

TGIP:  What effect does that menu choice have?

EB:  The stats of all of your players go down by 30% across the board.

TGIP:  Does the option only appear if Mike Dunleavy is coaching the team?

EB:  We thought about that, but honestly, Baron Davis can quit on any coach. 

7.  Josh Howard National Anthem Customizer

TGIP:  Moving on, I see you added some spiffy effects to the pre-game options.

EB:  Yes indeed.  We animated the entire national anthem and introductions, and we’re letting the player dictate exactly how his players act during the anthem in Association mode.

TGIP:  What happens if a player doesn’t stand as if he’s got a broom up his ass during the anthem?

EB:  Nothing.

TGIP:  I said ‘player’, not ‘white player’.

EB:  Oh.  In that case, expect a lot of frightening emails from southern states.

TGIP:  Anything more to know about this mode?

EB:  Two players have signature anthem behaviors:  Josh Howard and-

TGIP:  Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf?

EB:  Bingo.  We snuck him into the game just for this mode.

8.  Joe Johnson Health/Energy Meter

TGIP:  I saw a screenshot somewhere of Joe Johnson with health bar…what is that about?

EB:  Oh, that’s another new feature!  Basically, we added a bar to alert Hawks fans to the exact point in the middle of the season where Joe runs out of gas and starts playing like s–t.  It happens every year so we can just re-use the code for NBA 2K11.  We coded it for about 45 games, which is actually a bit generous.

TGIP:  Is there any way to toggle whether or not Josh Smith takes perimeter shots?

EB:  Just like in real life, no.  But you can always just control him in-game and make sure he always goes to the hole.  And speaking of toggles…

9.  Memphis Grizzlies Selective Control Locks

TGIP:  That must be a segue into the team-wide control input locks.

EB:  Yes.  Basically, there’s a pass button in the game but every time we would do QA testing for the Grizzlies, it would never come up.  The team actually plays most realistically if you disable that input button.  It’s the only one we have on by default.

TGIP:  Are there any others in the game?

EB:  The Golden State Warriors can’t hit the pause button.  The New York Knicks can’t hit the button to contest shots.  Ron Artest can’t hit the button to put on his pants before boarding the team bus.

TGIP:  Fascinating.  Well, that’s all the time we have, Erick.  Thanks so much for dropping by, and congratulations on a great game.

EB:  My pleasure.

DW6.5: Big Homos Countdown #2

(Explanation:  KOEI’s series of “Warriors” games are flashy beat-em-up titles with RPG elements and always feature a very colorful cast of characters.  While maligned by reviewers, they have a cult-following among people who realize that Double Dragon and Final Fight weren’t exactly  Civilization IV in terms of depth either, but were still fun.  With each iteration of the game series, though, the character roster has 9-10 guys who look like they can’t wait to leap into a tent and start giving each other the business.  This is our light-hearted look at the poofiest of the poofters.)

#2.  Ranmaru Mori

Quotes:         

“Stop it! I’m a man! Why can’t you see that?”
“I shall serve with unwavering devotion!”
“I still don’t understand how the enemy spotted me that time… They said something like ‘There are no girls in the priesthood.’ What could that possibly mean?”

Weapon:     An oversized sword.

Known For:     Looking forward to the next Lord Nobunaga moustache ride.  Being voiced by female VAs in almost every iteration of the series.

Rappers talk a lot about street cred.  The idea is that they sound a little more convincing talking about a tough, anti-authority upbringing if they have actually caught a case or two.  For those of us who think Cee-Lo is a soft drink, though, it’s much more difficult to get taken seriously when we pic up the mic.  The reason I’m talking about this is that many of the lavender elite we’ve profiled so far have had their personas drastically altered by KOEI, their mannerisms painted with a flowery pink brush they haven’t historically earned. 

Lu Xun, for example, was a burly Chinese general sort by all accounts, and the guys doing Dynasty Warriors decided he’d be a lot more compelling as a flighty young firebrand with perfect eyebrows.  To give you an idea of what that’s like, imagine somebody making a video game in the year 3890, and portraying Douglas MacArthur as a lithe ballerina in high-heels and a star-spangled dildo mask, kicking the shit out of Nazi footsoldiers with an American flag halberd.

If you’re seething over the injustice of it all, you should be relieved that the character in the #2 slot of our countdown actually historically sat on more poles than Dale Earnhardt.  Ladies and gentlemen (but especially gentlemen), I present Ranmaru Mori, the most famous male concubine of the Sengoku Era.

KOEI’s characterization of Ranmaru has been over-the-top enough to cultivate a legion of slavering shotakus and cosplay hags trying to jam their fat ankles into silken legwarmers.  I won’t go into the full depravities that have happened on roleplay message boards because of this character’s existence, but I’m sure you can imagine it if you try hard enough.  It’s a good thing I’m so desensitized that Sonic/Tails/Knuckles gangbang fan-fiction doesn’t even make me bat an eyelash anymore.

KOEI doesn’t even really make an attempt to steer the minds of their players away from the dark recesses to which we all, given the chance, typically withdraw.  Would you go to jail for this?  Take a close look at images below and you can see why Nobunaga, if alive today, would have been a prime candidate for a ride in the Party Van.

Things like this don’t translate well between eras, of course.  Unlike certain other cultures, the Western world is still a bit squeamish when it comes to embracing unabashed man-boy banana smuggling.  I’m sure that when regional lords were just chilling back in the day, doing whatever they wanted to their congressional pages and female ninjas, nobody said much about it.  Were the Oda still around in the present, however,  who knows what sort of backlash their Chris-Cornell-looking, smarmy-voiced leader might face?

Let this be a warning to you if you ever find yourself teleported to present-day North America from feudal Japan.  First, you can no longer play hide the salami with your paper boy without suffering punitive consequences.  Second, a bunch of fat weeaboo nerds are going to try to seduce your daughter if she looks even 25% Asian.

DW6.5: Big Homos Countdown #3

(Explanation:  KOEI’s series of “Warriors” games are flashy beat-em-up titles with RPG elements and always feature a very colorful cast of characters.  While maligned by reviewers, they have a cult-following among people who realize that Double Dragon and Final Fight weren’t exactly  Civilization IV in terms of depth either, but were still fun.  With each iteration of the game series, though, the character roster has 9-10 guys who look like they can’t wait to leap into a tent and start giving each other the business.  This is our light-hearted look at the poofiest of the poofters.)

#3.  Kojiro Sasaki

Quotes:         

“You’re tying me up? How quaint.”
“My, you’re quite strong. I’m getting goosebumps.”
“I’ll kill you in ways you never imagined.”

Weapon:     His pale, uncircumcized penis.   Wait, hold up.  Actually a no-dachi.  A big, uncircumcized no-dachi.

Known For:     Talking about wanting to “defeat” Miyamoto Musashi while everyone around rolls their eyes because they know what he really means.

What do you get when you combine a man who wears way too much makeup with a man who looks like a woman?  Nothing legal in California, that’s for sure.  But more importantly, you get Kojiro Sasaki, a frightening queen with what looks to be a fairly serious compensation problem.  You may remember this man from the last time you saw him wearing a wig and keeping women in a pit.

Kojiro captures spot number #3 on the Big Homos list with a cunning strategy combining predatory homosexual behavior with heavy use of cosmetics.  His well-documented desire to plunge every inch of his oversized blade into arch-nemesis Miyamoto Musashi is the absolute barest of euphemisms, as shown in the clip below:

Why is it that when you kill a man in war, they call you a hero…but when you kill a man out of love, they call it murder?

In actual history of course, Sasaki was a famous swordsman who met his cock against Miyamoto Musashi…shit.  Met his match.  Match.  Famously defeated in that duel by a sword carved from a boat oar, he’s a footnote in the story of Musashi, meaning his personality is not very clearly defined in whatever source material KOEI uses to shovel out the 100-character rosters in their games. 

The last thing you want to have when KOEI gets a hold of you is a non-defined personality, because KOEI will take that blank space and run with it.  Before all is said and done you might be a sub-educable retard, president of the FOX network, or, indeed, queer as a three-dollar bill.

DW6.5: Big Homos Countdown #4

(Explanation:  KOEI’s series of “Warriors” games are flashy beat-em-up titles with RPG elements and always feature a very colorful cast of characters.  While maligned by reviewers, they have a cult-following among people who realize that Double Dragon and Final Fight weren’t exactly  Civilization IV in terms of depth either, but were still fun.  With each iteration of the game series, though, the character roster has 9-10 guys who look like they can’t wait to leap into a tent and start giving each other the business.  This is our light-hearted look at the poofiest of the poofters.)

#4.  Lu Xun

Quotes:         

“”I have no time for shriveling cowards! Bring out a real man!”
“You want a piece of me?”
“We worked well together!”

And my personal favorite:

“How careless of me! Although this is where I would have laid a trap as well!”

Weapon:     Dual Short Swords (DW 3-5, Warriors Orochi 1-2),
Single Sword (DW 6)

Known For:     Laying traps, telling people about the times he laid a trap, predicting when and where Sima Yi would be laying a trap, and then showing up.  Talking to Lu Meng about laying traps.  Laying traps WITH Lu Meng.

Usually when I select a character with extravagent eye makeup, earrings, feathered pauldrons, perfect skin, shapely lips, come-hither eyes and wrists so slender that they remind me of a crochety old woman yanking her niece around at the supermarket, the next thing I do is check the manual to see how I can use the Sixaxis controls to make her boobs jiggle.  Not in this case, though, since Lu Xun allegedly has a penis and my interests are ill-founded and awkward. (He may even grow body hair once you level him past 50.) 

A protege of Lu Meng (*wink wink*, *lubing noises*), Lu Xun can lay claim to being bad-ass in early Dynasty Warriors iterations since the developers rolled the dice and he was one of the guys who got lucky and had the death element attached to his best weapons.  Even back then he was dressing in a suspect manner and referring to “breaking through Hu Lao Gate” in tones of speech indicating an obvious double-entendre.

Lu Xun eventually got tired of that outfit (due, one imagines, to multiple incidents not unlike those experienced by Monica Lewinsky) and assumed his current appearence for Dynasty Warriors 6.  His lust for the attentions of  his fellow officers hasn’t diminished in the least, however, (the usual- Zhou Tai stumbles drunkenly into his tent, slurring about “misplacing his scabbard”, just another night in camp outside of Jiang Dong) as evidenced by his statistics at the character select screen:

When he’s not doing his main job of keeping Huang Gai’s weapon safe from the elements, Lu Xun has helped the kingdom of Wu in many battles.  His greatest contribution has probably been somehow keeping fellow Wu Kingdom assbandits Zhou You and Ling Tong off of this list by virtue of his own limitless capacity for scrotum snorkeling.  In particular, it takes a monsterous queer to keep Zhou Yu and his meticulously-kept hair away from the title of “Gayest Wu Officer”, and so Zhou Yu and each one of the other one-note-characterization Wu officers owe Lu Xun a (poorly voice acted) debt of thanks and maybe a ride on one or both of Taishi Ci’s battle rods.

I should leave you with a word of advice if you started masturbating furiously upon seeing the first image in this post, only to subsequently discover that Lu Xun is actually a man.  Don’t worry, it happens to the best of us.  Just take a ride in someone’s pickup truck, play some Madden with a friend, and forget the entire silly incident actually occured. 

The next time you sit down to play a Warriors game, pick someone with hair on his chest and rest easy knowing you’re as straight as they come and you’d never want to bang a dude or use the Sixaxis to manipulate his taut buttocks.

What?  Why are you looking at me like that?

(Pictures and movies for this article courtesy of KOEI Warriors and The KOEI Wiki.)

DW6.5: Big Homos Countdown #5

(Explanation:  KOEI’s series of “Warriors” games are flashy beat-em-up titles with RPG elements and always feature a very colorful cast of characters.  While maligned by reviewers, they have a cult-following among people who realize that Double Dragon and Final Fight weren’t exactly  Civilization IV in terms of depth either, but were still fun.  With each iteration of the game series, though, the character roster has 9-10 guys who look like they can’t wait to leap into a tent and start giving each other the business.  This is our light-hearted look at the poofiest of the poofters.)

#5.  Yoshimoto Imagawa

Quotes:         “I will be lonely no more!”
                      “I feel plump and more magnificent than ever!”

Weapon:     Sword + Kemari Balls

Known For:     Brushing up against Kenshin Uesugi’s crotch and then laughing it off as an “accident”.

I’ve never played much as Yoshimoto.  I only like my pudgy, effeminate, powder-faced men in one of two ways- swabbing the soon-to-be-tortured Dread Pirate Roberts, or managing the Undertaker.  It’s just as well.  He’s hands-down the worst character in Warriors Orochi 2, which with a roster of 90+ playables is no mean feat.  Wielding a phallic object alongside it’s counterpart testicle, he lacks the range, power and testosterone to do much of anything besides mince around and fall on his face, presumably in the hope of smothering a young enemy warrior under his croissant-like body. 

A surefire ticket for any player to getting his ass kicked by Lu Bu, Yoshimoto’s movelist is as anemic and flaccid as his underslung, gut-shadowed, woman-averse penis.  Of course, getting pounded by a stout halberd is just another Saturday night in the pagoda for him.  Here, we see that his idea of a good time involves dancing around like a bell-end and fantasizing about which clouds most resemble Yukimura Sanada’s ass.

Unlike characters such as Sima Yi (aka. “Miss Thang”) and Zhou Yu, who aggressively propogate the battlefield with their estrogen auras to the extent that base captains are defeated by the overwhelming queenery of their robe-clad vaginas, Yoshimoto is fairly passive, harmless, and child-like in his chocolate thiefdom.  Of course, the same could have been said of Michael Jackson, and we all know how that turned out for a succession of the young and impressionable. 

One gets the unmistakable idea that Yoshimoto would like nothing better than to take a young soldier home and show him the wonders of kemari before plying him with booze and pills and leaving him to question the next morning which member of the Takeda cavalry led the charge up his rear end.

His cluelessly gleeful face hides a dark penchant.  If KOEI adds a “sex offender registry” to Warriors Orochi 3, Yoshimoto Imagawa will be the first guy on it, and GameSpot might bump the review up to 4.5 as a reward for finally adding a new feature to an engine that has seen more skins than Ed Gein.  I should make clear here that I in no way equate homosexuality and kiddie-diddling, so you can lower your Gucci pitchforks right now and turn them back to where they were.  Yoshimoto just happens to fill out the cleft in that Venn diagram in that he’s gay as a cocked hat and also more than comfortable leaning out of the side of a van with box of Mike & Ike in one hand and his fudgedozer in the other.  And by “fill out the cleft”, I mean “penetrate the unwilling anus of a sun-swaddled farmboy”. 

Should his manhood be called into question, Yoshimoto might take a break from lathering donut-sugar on his face long enough to raise his high-as-fuck voice in some semblance of protest.  Sadly, the semi-literate mad geniuses of the Interwebs were on to him as early as 2007.

Believe it or not, this sad emperor-wannabe’s Pennywise The Clown levels of creepiness and inability to hit puberty aren’t enough to bump him higher than #5 on this list… a ranking that is a testament to the brigade of bum-punchers propogating the roster of any given KOEI offering.  You could show up in DW7 in a bondage mask, wielding dildo-handle nunchaku and spinning on the end of your schwanz for a Musou Attack and still only pull an Honorable Mention.

(Pictures and movies for this article courtesy of KOEI Warriors.)