NBA Ballers update

The long road of development for Midway's upcoming basketball game NBA Ballers is finally nearing an end. Midway announced at a press event in Las Vegas today that the game is nearly finished and that both versions of the game are currently in the submission and approval process at Sony and Microsoft, which will more than likely allow both games to make their shared scheduled release date of April 5.

The version of the game shown at Midway's event is very nearly complete, and it appears to have come together nicely. The game has a lot of different options and two distinct single-player modes. The TV tournament mode is built like a fighting game ladder, and you can play as one of the game's NBA players, or you can create a player here by using around 800 different items. The rags to riches mode starts you out with a weak created player and bills itself as the first story mode to be seen in a sports game. Here you'll start out as a lowly street baller, but you'll eventually work your way into the Ballers tournament and will compete against the NBA's best. The neat twist here is that your created player's stats develop differently depending on how you play the game. So to raise your dunking abilities, you'll have to attempt (and slam) a lot of dunks. Same goes for various defensive maneuvers, three-point shooting, and more.

Once you've completed the rags to riches mode, you can then take your created player--who will likely be more powerful than any of the other players in the game--into the game's other modes, including the online mode in the PlayStation 2 version of the game.

The level of control in NBA Ballers seems pretty solid from the games we've played so far. Midway compares the action in Ballers to that of a fighting game, complete with up-close fakeout moves that essentially serve as the game's version of a throw. With lots of moves and countermoves, there certainly appears to be a lot of depth to NBA Ballers' gameplay.

NBA Ballers has been in development for a pretty long time, so it's nice to see that the light at the end of the tunnel has a promising glow to it. The game is currently scheduled to hit shelves on April 5.