09-30-2015, 02:21 PM
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#48
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Books Nelson Simnation
OVR: 43
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Queens, NY
Posts: 10,922
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Re: Overall; What are your thoughts on Spike Lee's MyCareer Story?
Conceptually, I don't like forcing players into a passive experience in video games. For MyCareer it's even more of a mistake, because the mode thrives on customization. That said, once you start it up, you are acquiescing to Spike's request to let him tell you a story.
Writing: It has its highs and lows. Cliches are forgivable, but Spike doesn't do a lot to use our expectations to expose a greater truth. Freq is a sympathetic character and I think the great success of the mode is the ability to talk about your MyCareer character's personal life, which is a part of the NBA experience for better or worse. It's predictable and forced in parts, but achieves some moments of honesty, which is really what you hope for in any story.
Acting: Under the circumstances, I think the voice cast did a great job. People underestimate the challenge of finding a human moment in a snot green room while wearing a body suit and a helmet/camera apparatus. While they didn't elevate the material, they displayed some moments of humanity.
Music: Great mix of funk, jazz and soul that speak both to the roots of Harlem and basketball.
Directing: There was surprisingly little cinema within the story. Even if you account for 2k's restrictions, there were events in text that could have been punctuated with visuals. No short clips of high school celebrations or graduation? No cutting of nets? No evidence of the college struggles they allude to for a brief part of your freshman year? Though Lee claims a documentary approach, the majority of the story is dramatized with only a few short seconds of sparse interviews between scenes. The camera moves and lighting are adequate at best and awkward at their low moments, never providing a scene where it shined as a movie and finding more success when it was a digitized stage play.
Overall: I'm fine with being Frequency for a year, but I hope this isn't a trend with 2k. As mentioned earlier, MyCareer is a customization mode through and through, from your face scan to your eventual Pro-Am team. Shoehorning a passive experience into that is a mistake, and big name directors and actors can at best make it an entertaining mistake.
Next year, I hope players are truly allowed to "Be the Story" and 2k finds a way to enhance the tale that players tell about themselves rather than allow some celebrity to hog the mic and force feed us their message.
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