2K8: B-Ball Zombie War, compiled by Stones Throw founder Peanut Butter Wolf, has another context outside just being a video game tie-in soundtrack: It's also the latest in a long line of Stones Throw state-of-the-label comps. But unlike most video game tie-in soundtracks, its relation to NBA 2K8's actual in-game music is largely tangential, aside from the fact that the two compilations both share a new vocal reworking of J Dilla's Donuts track "Lightworks" featuring Talib Kweli and Q-Tip. Maybe it's for the better, since your average Stones Throw act feels more suited to the freewheeling retro-funk atmosphere of a game like NBA Street Vol. 2, with its "T.R.O.Y."-themed old-meets-new-school vibes and its cartoonish arcade-style Maravich-to-Garnett alley-oops; it's just too out there for a glossy next-gen simulation like 2K8. But after two still-fresh Chrome Children collections, the first of which was released almost exactly a year previous to Zombie War, is it all that necessary to have the third album in the space of 12 months that basically boils down to being yet another label sampler (and that's not even counting their actual 2007 label sampler)?

Well, B-Ball Zombie War's got novelty going for it, at least in one respect: The artists you might expect to stand out on this thing mostly spend their time coasting. "Lightworking", the aforementioned "Lightworks" remix, is a bit of a letdown: Kweli sounds buried under Dilla's busy moog-exotica industrial film burble and raps like he's just rattling off vaguely word-sounding syllables, while Tip's comparative vocal clarity only makes the scattershot ADD incoherence of his lyrics (culture vultures/golddiggers/requisite video game metaphor/etc.) that more clear. MF Doom fans clamoring for more Madvillainy will have to settle for a brief, unsurprising verse on "Mash's Revenge"-- he doesn't sound nearly as thematically and creatively constrained as he did on, say, The Mouse and the Mask, but his internal rhyming and truism-tweaking seems uncharacteristically forced, even if it's frequently funny ("sell a bear trucker doo-doo/foes go to hell in a seersucker muu-muu").

And even if Madlib still sounds pretty good on autopilot, the sparse mumbling on "The Wigflip" and the straightforward breakup-song verses on Quasimoto track "Hydrant Game (Jaylib Remix)"-- both Dilla-beat tracks, like the other aforementioned songs-- don't entirely seem to match their production's energy. But just as some of the marquee names surprise here by phoning it in, it's also a bombshell to hear some of the MCs that listeners might've previously written off just straight-up shining: between MED's firebreathing performance on the Just Blaze-produced "Break It Down" and Guilty Simpson's wise-ass battle-hustler turns on "Make It Fast" and "Mash's Revenge," there's a couple back catalogues I'm going to have to go back and reevaluate-- were these cats always this good and it just wasn't obvious until now?

But Zombie B-Ball War isn't entirely as cut-and-dried as that lazy stars/fiery b-teamers scenario might make it seem. A couple known vets like MC Percee P and turntablist J. Rocc bring their A game, and Madlib does have his share of highlights, dropping a short but sick headknock-soul instrumental ("Trouble") under his Beat Konducta guise and teaming up with newcomer Karriem Riggins as Supreme Team for the shapeshifting opener "See (Suite)", which rides on three drastically different, equally dope beats in four minutes. And you can't blame the big names for the fact that the CD goes downhill fast after about 34 of its 58 minutes: While "Lightworking" is the only rap track on the comp that you could really call substandard (Niko & DJ Babu's "Now You Know" gets a pass because, c'mon, the kid's four years old), the dance-party turf of the compilation's latter third gets into some dregs. It's an interesting novelty to hear NWA castoff Arabian Prince lay down some circa-1984 electro for "Professor X Saga", but Dam-Funk's lounge-synth groove "Sidewayz" goes from three minutes of smoothness to five minutes of tedium, and a couple synthpop atrocities by Baron Zen and James Pants make Beck at his neon-encrusted Debra-serenading goofiest sound like Otis goddamned Redding. Sitting through all this at the compilation's end is like having to deal with the inevitable cheap-ass 4th quarter comeback computer opponents of NBA Jam, stealing all your balls and blocking all your shots to kill your momentum.