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When 2K Sports released NBA 2K back on the Dreamcast a decade ago, it was a revelation not just in basketball games but sports games in general. It set a new bar on graphics, gameplay and recreating the authenticity of the sport on screen. Its first foray on the X360 was NBA 2K6 but that was a lacklustre first effort until NBA 2K7 showed us what next-gen hoops was supposed to be like. Since then it’s been the critic’s choice every year up against its rival franchise by EA Sports, NBA Live. The NBA 2K series has been refining its game each year to the point where any changes to the core mechanics could be a detriment to the game. It’s a tough proposition for a developer to offer something new each year without compromising the feel of the core gameplay that its success is built upon. However if you don’t innovate or improve on the previous year then there’s not much incentive for the public to pick up the updated version. NBA 2K10 marks the ten year anniversary of the series and I’m glad to say that Visual Concepts have upped the ante once again with new refinements and additions, making it the most feature-packed NBA 2K yet.

This year’s biggest addition is a new game mode called My Player, which is similar to the individual career modes that are prevalent in recent sports games. You start by creating a fledgling nobody with the aim to turn him into a superstar. You can adjust all the usual visual parameters as well as shooting style, layup and dribbling styles along with signature moves once you level up your character. This is done through training camp, drill sessions and getting experience from playing practice games, hopefully getting into the NBA draft. Playing games in My Player mode will see you graded from A to F which will determine how many points you can assign to your skill set. Make a great assist, play tight defense or make good shot selections and you’ll be rewarded with real-time feedback of how well you’re doing. On defense you also get a little arrow indicator showing the direction of who you should be guarding which is always helpful. The game does punish you quite severely however for some bad plays that you didn’t think mattered too much or didn’t think were bad decisions. Overall it’s a solid system bar some weird calls and the My Player mode is a good fit for the virtual game of basketball as you’re always be involved in the action even when controlling only one player. The progression aspect adds an RPG element to it and I think gamers this year will probably find the My Player mode as much of a time sink as the usual Association/Franchise mode. For their first effort, the developers have done extremely well with this new mode and you can also take your player online and play with other My Player characters in a hoops version of “team deathmatch”. Just be warned however that whatever weight, muscle tone and height, etc. you set for your character will have an effect on their starting stats and playing style. So before you start modelling your character on your pudgy 200lb, 5’9” muscle-less self, consider that there are better starting specimens for a killer shooting guard. I just happen to have an uncanny similarity to MJ’s physical build in real life…

In regards to the on-the-court action, the most obvious change is to the Turbo mechanic. Previously you would hold the Right Trigger and the player would run faster and obviously tire faster but with no visual indication of how to balance speed vs stamina. Now the system is enhanced so that you can see a bar deplete in two stages and depending on how long and often you use the sprint button will determine how quickly the player will recuperate their sprint energy before eating into their stamina. This will determine how long they have to sit on the bench before recovering as well. Having a visual cue is great and adds another micro-layer of strategy to the game. Do you save and conserve your sprint energy for the fast breaks or do you have a deep bench and can afford to up the tempo? Along with the Turbo meter, the ability icons make a return as well as well as a streak indicator to show how “hot” they are in sinking the basket. Get a few in a row unanswered and you’ll see it spike up. Miss a few in a row and even Ray Allen will go as cold as a fish. The isomotion, post-ups and play-calling are back and tweaked a little. You can still push on the D-pad and bring up a mini menu to cycle through your plays and strategies on-the-fly, although they’ve grown from eight to twenty-four. A bit of overkill for bread and butter pick-and-roll players like me but I’m sure many players will appreciate the extra depth. There are new animations and watching players go up for lay-ups and shifting their weight and body to get to the basket is in a word – beautiful. The default settings for the likelihood of shots going in however are unrealistically high however as my computer opponents are routinely netting 60-80% shot percentages. I’m sinking maybe 40-50% which is the expected average, until I went into my profile and found that I was only making 10% perfect releases on my shots, with 70% of them being too late. This means if I timed my button release properly I would have made the same amount shot % as the computer. Luckily there are settings to adjust everything from shot completion to charging frequency, etc. to better represent the real game’s statistics. And professional basketball if nothing else, is a game of stats.

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