Sunday, February 13, 2005; Page F08
NBA STREET V3, EA Sports
The latest incarnation of EA's arcade-style street-hoops game doesn't make much of a break from the past, but it does look flashier and play faster. NBA Street's action is still all about the GameBreaker -- the almost-impossible-to-block shot you're granted if you pull off enough trick moves and dunks on your opponents. In V3, though, you no longer see a canned animation of a GameBreaker shot. Instead, you've got a live view of the action that lets you perform combo moves to run up more points. You can also get your two teammates involved to perform three-man hookup dunks. Finally, to give players more of a challenge, the game no longer treats GameBreakers as automatic points; if you don't time your moves just right, you'll brick the shot. Control gets an upgrade with V3's Trick Stick, an adaptation of an option debuted in EA's NBA Live. Here, you can use the controller's right analog stick to perform tricks -- flick it in various directions to perform a staggering number of dribble and crossover moves. This takes some serious practice to get right, but when you learn the ways of the Trick Stick your opponents can only sit back and watch some pretty spectacular dunks. You can unlock extra tricks as you keep playing, which should reduce the chance of you seeing the same trick multiple times. There's even more depth in the game's "Street Challenge" mode, which allows you to create a player by choosing from hundreds of custom options, then take him on a 10-week tour of the game's 12 street courts. Start winning games and you start earning points that can be used to upgrade your player and customize your team; eventually, you'll be playing street ball against actual pro players. V3 is the rare console game that looks just as good on all three platforms (online game play, however, is offered only on PS2 and Xbox). The players' heads and faces look realistic down to the piercings, and their uniforms actually move properly as they hustle on the court. -- Tom Ham
PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, $50
SUIKODEN IV, Konami
This sequel to Konami's role-playing games takes the genre in a few new places. First, Suikoden (pronounced, we think, "shoo-e-ko-den") IV takes place mostly on the sea, in a large ship that you can sail from island to island and battle to battle. Second, while you still play as one character, you can also recruit up to 108 others to live on your ship and fight with you. That's quite a full clubhouse once you've filled every bunk on the boat, but don't expect to reach that goal in any kind of a hurry. Each of these characters has some special quality, making finding all 108 of these "Stars of Destiny" a real challenge. Suikoden's story line has an intriguing twist: The young knight you play carries a mark on his hand, the "rune of torment," that both grants him great power in combat and slowly saps his life force in return. It has left each of its previous owners a smoldering husk before leaping to its next host. To add to his worries, he also starts the game by being expelled from his home island after being blamed for the death of the last rune holder. As he tries to clear his name, he faces plenty of other challenges from assorted evildoers. On land, he and three other characters must fight off opponents with swords and shurikens, while on sea magical ship-to-ship combat requires you to pick the right "rune shell" to fire from your vessel's cannons -- lightning, earth, fire and so on. (In one such encounter, the trick is to listen to your adversary's taunting, then plan an appropriate countermove.) The action takes place one turn at a time, which may bore gamers used to faster-paced real-time games. But if you're tired of clickfest games, Suikoden IV's more relaxed pace and creative game design may represent a journey worth taking. -- John Breeden II
PlayStation 2, $40
GROKKER 2.2, Groxis
The imaginative folks behind this program wrote it to offer a visual view of the Web -- as if it were something you could navigate without words. This Web- and desktop-search software does that by neatly presenting search results as maps of marble-shaped "nodes" that group similar topics. That graphical view takes up the left side of Grokker's window, while the right side shows the addresses of a selected node's sites. The best demonstrations of this come with broad queries that will yield hundreds of answers. A search for "kabbalah," for example, delivered 346 results that Grokker sorted into 203 nodes, including "tradition," "teachings" and "religion." A click on "tradition" allowed Grokker to further subdivide the results under that node into such subtopics as "oral tradition" and "mystical tradition." (Grokker can also show results in a conventional list format.) Grokker's nodes serve as breadcrumbs that keep you from getting lost while perusing seemingly endless and random results. The program also lets you further refine searches with keyword, domain-name and source filters. Users can save these node maps and share them via e-mail with other Grokker-ers; they can also switch share info via e-mail with other Grokker-ers. Grokker can search the Web at large -- using either Google or a set of other search sites that include Yahoo, MSN and AltaVista -- Amazon.com's inventory, your hard drive or any other disk on your local network. A plug-in system lets users add other search tools if they'd like. All this makes Grokker a fascinating tool to try out during the 30-day free trial available to new users. But after that? If you're not a professional researcher or some other info-pro, you're probably not going to find it worth the $49 price. -- Sacha Cohen
Win 2000 or newer, Mac OS X 10.3, $49 at www.grokker.com
