Operation Sports, 3/26/07--8 out of 10 Stars.

I spend a lot of time playing video games. Not as much as my wife tells people I spend, but I do spend my fair share of time gaming on various platforms. The women in my life are very tolerant and patient with my hobby. My wife accepts it as part of my personality. She knew about it when she met me and, as she says, there are so many worse things I can be doing with my time and disposable income. My oldest daughter is a first grader and has very little interest in Dad’s games. She likes playing games, but much prefers Barbie or any other glamorous princess dress-up games that she can find. The more bling, the better!

So my #1 partner in crime in my gaming is my youngest. She’s five and my little tomboy in the making. She loves sports. She likes running and tackling. She’s my sparring partner and plays a wicked good game of “mercy”. She knows which envelopes in the mailbox are going to contain the next game for “Daddy to write about.”

Picking up my affection for sports and gaming, she very often wants to try to play the games that I play. Unfortunately, even on the easiest settings, most of the games are just not forgiving enough for her to have any fun with. When she learned about Create-A-Player modes, she always wants me to create her, but is always disappointed that 99% of the times, the only options are male. That’s why I was very excited to find out that I would be taking a look at Backyard Basketball 2007 on the PS2.

The concept of Backyard Basketball 2007 is pretty simple. The NBA stars of today, playing basketball on unique courts all over the world, but not at their current age, but as kids. Paul Pierce, Shaq, Ben Wallace; today’s All-Stars in smaller, far cuter versions. Sprinkle in some fictitious kids and the ability to create your own – male or female - and you’ve got Backyard Basketball 2007.

Playing the game is like playing the sports games that we grew up with. There’s no left trigger-modified reverse shot-stick bumper-pulled aggressive layups that require digit Twister. The triangle button shoots. Period. Where you are on the court will determine the type of shot you take. Kid-friendly controls on a game for kids? What a remarkable concept. That’s not to say you can’t get fancy by executing power-ups through some fancy trigger moves, but I found through my own playing and watching my little 'baller give it a whirl, you don’t have to use them to have fun. My daughter never tried anything other than pass and shoot and she never stopped smiling.

It’s hard to punish a game like this for being a little rough in the area of visuals and sound. It’s not that kind of game. The graphics are pretty mediocre even by PS2 standards, but it works. The player models are cute caricatures of their NBA counterparts. Forget about the shoes and the jerseys and all of the other superficial stuff that gets nit-picked to death by run-of-the-mill sports gamers. The audio is goofy and consists of a few lines of squeaky dialogue that becomes hard to listen to pretty quickly for adults, but my kids giggled at it almost every time.

The team behind Backyard Basketball 2007 knows who their market is. This is a really good game for not only kids, but for adult gamers who want to share gaming with their children. If you’re a 21 year-old college kid looking for a game to play between keg-stands, this isn’t the one. If you’re looking for spot-on, photo-realistic NBA action, skip it. My daughter and I loved this game for the experience. It’s not about the AI, the graphics, or the animations. It’s what gaming should be about – fun. And when it’s family fun, well, that’s a huge bonus.

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