NBA Street V3 is a basketball game set in the gritty concrete courts of downtown USA. It has no rules, really, only points, and physics itself only rarely intrudes on the action. This much makes the game sound like a pure and unadulterated delight. Much of the time it is. It is a thrill to jump 17 feet into the air and fling the ball (or, rather, the "rock") to a teammate who is himself hovering 19 feet up. It is an even bigger thrill to watch him stuff it two-handed into the twine. When the game rewards the stunt with hundreds or thousands of "trick points," the excitement can be unbearable. For a moment or two, anyway.

As it turns out, trick points are the heart and soul of Street V3; the game is not really about scoring baskets at all. Most of the time, putting the ball through the hoop yields a single point on the scoreboard. Blocking a shot, meanwhile, is worth a cool thousand trick points. Stealing the ball and then pulling off a clever bit of fancy dribbing and then alley-ooping the thing into the hoop can mean 20,000 trick points or more, depending on how much flash goes into the operation. Games end when one team hits 21 scoreboard points. The race for trick points never stops.

Is the big picture a little clearer now? In basketball, we have one goal above all others: Win the game. In Street V3, we would like to win games, because winning games is apparently something basketball players are fond of. But we don't put our hearts into winning games. The fire that burns in our bellies is all about trick points. It is about chaining one trick after another after another, looking for recognition and big numbers and juice for the "Gamebreaker meter."

In many ways this is a lot like real professional basketball, where a culture of hero-worship and too many highlight shows creates athletes like Vince Carter, men of supreme talent who really couldn't care less about winning or the teams they play for, but are delighted to work hard for the sake of their own salaries and stat sheets.

If you're OK with that, consider this. In real basketball, the point is to put the ball in the hoop more often than your opponent. If running clever plays is a means to that end, great. If dunking and making grumpy faces and mugging for the camera helps give you a psychological edge, that's great too. But if you can score without a playbook, nobody will fault you for that.

On the other hand, if you are all about the clever plays and the dazzle and the showing off how hard you've practiced alley-ooping, if you have mad skillz but you have no game, then you belong not in basketball but in family entertainment, where you can lay the smackdown on the Washington Generals four nights a week and everyone will cheer your routine.

There is another sport where you can work on your routine over and over until you nail those combos. You get to go out all by yourself in a big arena, and you get to show everyone how hard you practiced, and if you pull it off everyone cheers and if you fall down everyone goes "oooooh!", and afterward a panel of judges award you points. While you wait for the results, you sit in an area called the "kiss and cry" and your coach hugs you and gives you flowers.

NBA Street V3 is not figure skating. But as you play, you will feel more like Emanuel Sandhu than LeBron James. And you will probably miss basketball.