After spending so long playing 2K, something finally clicked with me and I realized all the shit I've been putting up with in this series that I would never normally put up with from a AAA developer. The basketball simulation is polished - it has to be, or else people would never spend so much money on an online component. But there is just so much to complain about here that it'd be death by a million cuts for anything that isn't the biggest basketball simulation on the market.

Only the biggest basketball simulation on the market can get away with including a career mode each year that increasingly makes me feel like someone has retrofitted a student film with mentions of Gatorade sponsorships and JBL headphones. Only the biggest basketball simulation on the market can get away with forgetting my audio settings at the end of each quarter, blasting my ears with five times the volume for a second before returning to normal. Only the biggest basketball simulation on the market can get away with making me watch full-video car advertisements before every game.

It's gross. It sucks for basketball fans that this is the only real option, given that EA has decided it wasn't worth competing (to say nothing of EA's reputation as a company). I want something better for basketball sims, I want to feel less guilty when I buy the game for a measly nine dollars. It's frankly incredible that Take-Two's greed has so thoroughly coated the game with slime that it deprives you of the enjoyment of basketball, because every break in the action reminds you where the development priorities lie - not in fixing bugs, not in improving the UX, but in finding increasingly blatant ways to squeeze a little extra money out of their game.

"'I'm not like other video game critic, you see. I have an appreciation for the more obscure narrative driven JRPGs. So frankly, I've never understood the popularity of Persona 5. It is a poorly made set of events happening overtime to pretend to create a cohesive narrative' Twitter user @MommyMisato59 types in the Discord server of some let's play channel with 400 subscriber server. Pondering life, she exhales as she reaches past her Testament Nendroid to grab her limited edition Dragon Quest Monsters themed PlayStation Vita 2000. She thinks about what she will do after she clocks out from her shift at Burger King tomorrow while Depeche Mode's 'Enjoy the Silence' plays through her Sennheiser HD 800 S headset. 'Maybe I'll get back to my save in Koudelka' she says softly to herself out loud, before interrupting her words with a thought to practice some more on Slippy netplay. No matter what she does tomorrow, she can revel in the fact that only her and her fellow users on /V/ have such a deep, emotional understanding of video games. Truly a humble life for a next generation Nardwuar, wouldn't you say."

Rating: C
Genre(s): JRPG, SRPG