The only thing that looks awkward at times is dunking. When you know how the free-throw shooting works, the process becomes very intuitive thanks to those clean, well defined animations. The animation, on the other hand, is tops. That said, cartoony graphics have aged better on older platforms, and they still look ok here, so in another 10 years, they will be more likely to stand up. The graphics themselves are kind of cartoony, in part because it’s an early game and in part because NCAA student-athletes can’t lend their likenesses to an effort like this. The game looks pretty good, even if it’s obviously first gen for the PS3. The end result being that, unless the play is a simple pick and roll, in general I’ve had more success making my own offense than using set plays. If you do screw up, though, you have to reset as your players don’t react too intelligently if something goes wrong. Plays are easy to call up and are usually simple to execute. You’re actually going to be rewarded in this game for working the ball around the perimeter, shifting the D, then driving in for a layup, or posting up and/or kicking out beyond the arc. 2k8, more than any other game out there, captures the feel of the college game, such as motion offense, zone defense, and actually passing the ball, while still being highly playable, and providing those satisfying one-on-one, isolation dribble-drive moments that are the bread and butter of NBA games. In the twenty years between Kansas NCAA championships basketball games matured right along with me, and, on the college side at least, College Hoops 2k8 represents the ultimate end of that evolution. In that time, I’ve turned to the world of sports gaming to try and get my fix and my timing couldn’t have been better, or worse, depending on how you look at it. For a few years, I’d tried to keep a weekly game going with my friends from high school that were in town, but at this point, many of them had moved on, and for those of us that hadn’t, the rough world of street ball had begun to take its toll in ways it hadn’t when we were teens. But by 2003 I was crying when Hakim Warrick blocked a game-tying three shot by Michael Lee in the finals to bring Syracuse its first national title, and screaming at the top of my lungs five years later when a similar game-tying shot went past the outstretched arms of Chris Douglas-Roberts, this time made, by Super Mario Chalmers to put the game into overtime, and ultimately give Kansas its third NCAA title to date.

On a Friday afternoon in 1988 when my alma-mater was busy working its way to an unlikely NCAA tournament championship, I was at home crying because tournament coverage had pre-empted the weekly Legend of Zelda cartoon on the Super Mario Bros. Although I’d played sports throughout my youth, I’d never really paid attention to them on TV.

College hoops 2k8 rosters 2007