2K Sports introduced NBA 2K8 to the world with a bang, by holding the first-ever nighttime outdoor motion capture session. Four NBA players – cover athlete Chris Paul, Andre Iguodala, Gerald Wallace, and Rudy Gay – slipped into their motion capture suits and showed their stuff at Rucker Park in New York. 2K Sports chose this evening’s festivities to reveal NBA 2K8’s new Blacktop mode, highlighted by the Sprite Slam Dunk Contest.

The opening seconds of the introduction will make it obvious to you that they didn’t aim to merely duplicate the NBA Slam Dunk Contest, held annually during All-Star Weekend. The cameras descend on an outdoor court on the Las Vegas Strip for this event, hosted by well-known streetball figure Bobbito Garcia. Known to some as Kool Bob Love and to others as DJ Cucumberslice, Garcia appears fully rendered, animated, and recorded in the game. He handles player introductions, commentary, and even adds humor to the event as he struts around the court giving his opinion of each dunk. DJ Cucumberslice composes only a part of the night’s impressive atmosphere. The reactions from spectators along the baseline and sidelines lend credence to the event and the real-time lighting in the environment helps to capture the intensity, especially during the replays from various angles that show off the surroundings.

Users can choose from a lineup of elite dunkers featuring freakish athletes such as LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Vince Carter, and reigning NBA Slam Dunk Contest champion Gerald Green. Performance in the dunk contest relies exclusively on the user’s ability rather than on any player ratings.

The contest itself consists of three rounds, with each of the up to four participants attempting three dunks per round. Dunkers operate under limits of both 30 seconds and two dunk attempts, but while the opportunity to try an elaborate dunk on your first attempt may seem enticing, keep in mind that the judges will penalize you for missed efforts. These judges score dunks on a 100-point scale and send the lowest scoring player back to the bench for good after each round. Because the sum of each player’s three dunks ultimately determines who advances to the next round, estimating risk and reward plays an enormous role in deciding which dunks to attempt. Players will receive some points for missed dunk attempts, but a consistently solid dunker can defeat a more daring player who tries complicated dunks but fails to complete them. Do not take this to mean, however, that sheer consistency will win you this competition – repetitive dunks will lead to disfavor with the judges!

As the saying goes, “Good things come in threes.” Whoever first said this phrase probably never meant it to apply to the art of dunking, but it holds true here too as dunks in the game consist of three parts: the gather, the in-air style, and the finish. You perform the gather and the in-air style by manipulating the right analog stick; the complexity of the motion correlates with the difficulty of the dunk. Pushing the analog in a basic direction for both the gather and in-air style will yield only simple dunks, but mixing it up with semicircles and revolutions take dunks to the next level. Players can perform over 300 different dunks – not counting the use of props – ranging from basic tomahawks to 360s, self-passes, and even the cartwheel dunk made famous by Abdoul Bamba a decade ago. Oh, did I mention props? You can leap over chairs, drums, barrels, and even a car worthy of a Slam Dunk champion. The addition of such props increases your dunk’s potential score, but not without great risk.

The final part of a dunk - the finish- best captures the difficulty involved in performing a dunk that will bring down the house. When you prepare to slam it home after having completed your in-air style, a meter with a white bar appears. The rate at which the meter fills up and the size of the bar depend on the difficulty of the attempted dunk. You press the right trigger when the meter’s progress reaches the white bar; a timely press results in a successful dunk. The dunk contest’s learning curve becomes most apparent in this step, as we struggled to complete even the most basic dunks at first. As the night progressed, we graduated to trickier dunks and could perform them with a reasonable amount of consistency. Even so, we came away with the realization that it will take a good deal of practice and some natural skill to master this event.

You have the option of competing against CPU-controlled opponents, but the spirit of the evening’s competition contributed a great deal to our enjoyment of the game. Online play – which remains a possibility - would certainly add a great deal of longevity to this mode, particularly if it supported up to four players.

2K could not display or discuss anything else about NBA 2K8 at this time, but they assured us that new information would hit soon as the game approaches its early-October release date.

Operation Sports would like to thank the folks at 2K Sports for hosting a great event, as our brief taste of the game leaves us eagerly anticipating new information.