Reviews
The sports gaming juggernaut that is EA Sports seems to have a thorn in its foot for the past few years that it can’t quite seem to shake. The NBA Live series continues to rank second best to 2K Sports’ NBA 2K series since first appearing on the HD-era consoles with its dismal NBA Live 06 and with every new incarnation of NBA Live they show promise to sink the buzzer beater only to throw up a brick. However they get closer every year and this time with NBA Live 09, EA have been working hard in the off-season to come up with what possibly might be a game breaker – Live 365 and Dynamic DNA. This concept allows the game to map current trends, tendencies and statistics of teams and players during the NBA 08-09 season and apply them to the game itself. So say Kobe starts spending more time with ladies of the night rather than training and starts bricking them game after game in real-life, this will be reflected with his in-game persona as well (his shooting statistics that is, not his whoring ability). Of course, the staple upgrades of new rosters, smoother animations, better A.I. and more realistic play-calling are there to try and convince you to buy the new version. It also has the FIBA licence (continued from last year) but now increased to 24 national teams and a new Be a Pro mode plus the return of All-Star Weekend and Online game modes.
As always with EA products, the presentation is top notch and the game starts you in your home team’s gym allowing you to practice shooting some hoops and get a feel for controlling your player. From here you can access various training drills through the NBA Live Academy and completing them all scores you a large chunk of Achievements so they really tried to emphasise the various new controls and arsenal of offensive and defensive options. These drills are quite fun and are a great way to ease you into the game and learn the more advanced moves and plays. When you’re quite confident you know how to post up and score against Yao or how to stop KG in his tracks then you can move on to the various game modes on offer. You can literally lose yourself in the myriad of options and game modes available from and even the most ardent basketball fans will not find anything lacking. This game has enough statistics to make Oblivion look superficial.
The Live 365 feature is probably EA’s most ambitious taking as it updates (daily if you wish) you with real game scores, injuries and radio talk of the teams and league. It evens updates you with scores from other sports such as the Premier League and NFL through a ticker. The game comes with a code for a free 1 year subscription and agreeing to a contract to EA servers. Without the code, it will cost 800 MS points, so bear this in mind when buying second-hand copies as invariably the free code would have been used. The impact of the Live 365 feature cannot be underestimated in providing the gamer real immersion of the sport and the application of this data into Dynamic DNA means that the gaming term “simulation” is now upped another level. Of course this being an EA hoops game you can tinker with everything from the updating frequency, edit DNA data yourself even down to tendencies of which direction the player normally slashes to the hoop.
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