Welcome to the first edition of NBA 2K17 Kicks, a recurring Kicks On Fire feature where we try to recreate upcoming sneakers as best as we can using the in-game shoe editor. If you’ve been following our work in the past, you’ll know that sometimes we can get them surprisingly close to the real thing and other times we end up with a comedy of errors that maybe should never be talked about again. But that’s the fun of this exercise and of course, it gives me an excuse to fire up the PS4 Xbox One and try their screenshot options.
To celebrate the release of the new game, let’s take a look at our hero and yours, Russell Westbrook. The Oklahoma City Thunder guard is the early season candidate for NBA MVP because everybody expects him to do crazy Russell Westbrook things for 82 games out of pure spite thanks to Kevin Durant leaving OKC to join Stephen Curry and the Golden State “they blew a 3-1 lead in the Finals” Warriors.
As one of the faces of Jordan Brand, Westbrook will be wearing the Air Jordan XXX1 all throughout the season, including a pair we’ve already seen him wear, the Air Jordan XXX1 Shattered Backboard. The Banned XXX1 is available in 2K17 so we used that in the shoe editor and the result was… a better looking shoe. It might just be the poor image quality, but the orange in the upper just doesn’t pop like it should unlike in the Air Jordan 1 Shattered Backboard. We had to fix that in the game and I think the end result was “more orange is better.”
But we didn’t stop there as we also made the Air Jordan 1 Reverse Shattered Backboard which takes the hit 2015 release and gives it more of a Chicago feel. Westbrook might not wears 1s in the NBA, but he has been known to rock them plenty of times off the court. The kicks were easy enough to replicate using the color palette as the XXX1 Shattered Backboard although we changed the materials to leather where it was necessary to give them a more natural look.
The unforeseen result of all this? Now I want both Shattered Backboards that are dropping next weekend. As if we don’t have a busy enough Jordan holiday season already, ugh…
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