by: Andrew Thornton

January 15, 2008

EA also tried to fix some problems from last year. For example, now you have different buttons for shooting, dunking and using a lay up. In theory, this could provide somewhere near the control you have with the shot stick in the 2K series. In practice, it does the opposite. The system is clunky and never feels quite right. You'll constantly be trying to choose which one to do in each situation. You often won't be able to tell because there isn't a single good camera angle in the game; as gamers you start to take for granted that camera angles in sports games are decent at this point, but EA totally challenges that notion. A limited selection of camera angles makes this new system even harder to get used to. Some might say that it adds realism, but not when you can't see in a way which makes it possible to make the calls.

Improved computer AI is a bonus this time around…defenders actually play well. Your players do no such thing. But computer AI is actually good this year and can give you some sort of challenge. Too bad you're not having any fun being challenged but hey, it's there. The new superstar controls, which basically give you three tiers of advanced moves for star players, are nice touches, but really the level one moves are no less useful than level three, so why use the advanced ones if you don't need to? There's also not enough explanation on how to use them within the game, but hey, you'll pick it up in time. Collision detection here is horrendous and you'll see players flying through each other, flying through the backboard, balls going through players - it's all here. Players also don't adjust their shot at all for where they are on the court, which can get pretty ugly. You can tweak the game into somewhat playable form with some serious work in the game sliders, but you shouldn't have to work your butt off and try a hundred different combinations to just make the game playable in the least. It still isn't very good no matter what you do and there's competition which is fun right out of the box.

If you're looking to go online with this game, don't. That's all there is to it. You can't adjust sliders online so you're stuck with the crap defaults. There's almost no options online either and as laggy as the game is in single player, just imagine how bad it is online. Defense doesn't really exist, as you can't defend what you can't see. Run up court with your star and slam it…that seems to be the best option. Maybe it's just me here but isn't the “play online when a thousand people are on” achievement the stupidest one yet? How is that achieving something? If you're looking for replay value, I guess you could have fun tweaking the game's absurd roster. Players are in the wrong places in a few cases, players who resigned months ago still aren't on their correct team (a few aren't in 2K7 but it's much worse here), starting lineups are absurd and make no sense at all, and some of the player ratings are just horrible. Desanagana Diop's rating is mid 60s, this is for a guy who did a solid job of containing Shaquille O'Neal last year. Darko Milicic broke out once he went to the Magic last year, finally finding some playing time, but you'll still find him a 60s player. Ben Wallace is in the 70s, he may not be a very good offensive player but the defensive player of the year should at least be in the 80-85 range. It's almost like the development squad watched a 5 minute clip of each team and based their ratings on that. Don't even get me started on some of the foreign players moving to the NBA this year, was any scouting done on them? I do like the new ESPN integration, as you can see scores, news, watch some video, hear a radio broadcast while you're in the menus via the internet; it's very cool. I was hoping to see it integrated a bit more into the actual game but hey, it's something.

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If you're looking for a good basketball game, you haven't quite found it in NBA Live 07. You'd be much better spending your hard earned green on NBA 2K7.

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