I recently picked up NBA Live 2008. I’d put it off for a while coz everything I’d read about last years hoops games was that they were a bit average. But after playing a demo of it, and needing something to do until GTA IV comes out I thought I’d pick it up. If you haven’t played this game then reading more may bore you.

I’ve read a lot of reviews over the years and there’s a LOT of people who only play console games for the Dynasty. I never really understood why people would simulate season after season on a console sports game but that’s just me. I’ve always been about the actual game play. So rather than give any kind of insanely belated review of this game, I thought I’d just vent on a few key things and points out a few nice things.

Most annoying thing comes first. The load times on this game are INSANE. I don’t get how it can take this long to load. I could go make a cup of tea in the time it takes to load an actual game from the screen where you confirm your starting line up. And that’s boiling the jug from cold. Seriously I don’t know if it’s loading every drop of sweat for the graphics or something but I was watching Drum play NHL 2008 the other day and the game loads in about 10 seconds. The NBA Live 2009 better pick this up.

Once we get into the game everything’s ok though. It looks pretty nice, the player sizes are good and the lighting is sweet. The player intros with freeze frames and sepia tones are actually a pretty nice touch (leeched from EA Big no doubt) and the cut scene animations are hot.

One thing EA has always done well with NBA Live is animations. Ever since they introduced the 5-man mo-cap their game has always had a fluid and ‘alive’ feel to it. Players raise their hands to call for the ball. They fight through screens. In fact in almost all areas the contextual animations are spot on. Your player never feels too scripted when these events happen so you maintain the feeling of being in control. Dribbling and collisions look great, and almost all of the shooting animations are stunning (watch the replays).

Although the animations are great in general there are a couple of areas which are a little patchy and one area which really stands out as being just piss-poor. The average areas are blocks and rebounds. Firstly jumping for blocks is rarely effective at all, apart from maybe putting pressure on the shooter. You are almost never rewarded for good timing and anticipation, even with great shot blockers. Add to this the strange sight of jump shots getting volley-ball spiked into the first row and blocks prove to be a pretty mixed bag. The other patchy area is layups. Now, one handed shots and lay-ins around the hoop look really good, but a simple running layup on a fast break or open down the lane usually goes into an old ‘canned’ animation bringing on pointless up-and-unders or cradles when a off-the-glass layup would be perfect for the context.

And that brings me to the ugly part. For all it’s excellent contextual animations in dribbling, post play, shooting and collisions, the area where Live 2008 looks just plain ugly are dunks. There are two blaring reasons for this. The first is that there is almost no context selection in the dunks your player does. When you manage to weed Josh Smith between two guys and go at the rim he shouldn’t be doing a two hand windmill. Especially a two hand windmill that was mo-capped in 2002 and every player of NBA Live has already seen 10,000 times. When it comes to dunks, one of the most exciting plays in basketball, EA really need to be working hard on contextual dunk choices, more dunks in the dunk packs (meaning better dunks in given situations), and better animations. I just can’t stand it when some beast of a dunker goes up and does some weird-shit kicking thing with his legs while he taps the ball in and pulls his hand off the rim so fast it looks like he patted it. A couple of years ago Live brought out things like power-dunkers where with certain players you could really cram it on the defender and it looked huge! What the hell every happened to that, even simply in context?

There’s a couple of things missing from Live 2008 that I just can’t excuse. And there’s no reason for them not to be there. Not having a last-man-back button on defense has been killing me. Another annoying thing is not having freestyle defense. You pull down on the right stick for a defensive stance and you used to be able to attempt a steal by moving the stick left or right for a left or right handed steal. Now you have to take your hand off the stick and hit the steal button. Pain in the ass.

Apart from my whinging I’m liking the game. When it finishes loading. The AI is pretty good. The postup game is much improved. And it is pretty good looking. Hopefully the end of this year will bring a killer game. At last.