Reviewed: November 9, 2005
Reviewed by: Matt Gonzales
Publisher
Electronic Arts
Developer
EA Canada
Released: September 26, 2005
Genre: Sports
Players: 1-4
ESRB: Everyone
8
7
7
8
8.0
Supported Features
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
The juggernaut that is Electronic Arts may seem like the Death Star compared to other less powerful but very talented game devolopers. It's true that EA does do a lot of what Microsoft does in terms of assimilating their competition, but that doesn't mean that they are doing bad things for the common gamer out there. In many cases, the games they put out are some of the best of their kind. Case in point: The Lord of the Rings games. But some wonder if their contribution to sports games is as strong as their efforts in other genres.
The NBA Live series has been around for years and is one of the most lauded games of the sports games hierarchy. Of course this was before there was Visual Concepts and their stellar 2K series, but we'll talk about that later. Always standing a little on the arcadey side of things, the accessible game play coupled with all of the popular NBA stars and their licensed mugs made for a nearly unbeatable combination year after year on whatever platform they chose.
Basketball games may not be as popular as football games on video game consoles, but they definitely have their following. And the importance of having all of the latest rosters and signature moves of the most popular players of the NBA cannot be overemphasized. NBA Live 06, the expected yearly update to the enduring franchise, has the usual roster updates and new moves and modes, but will it hold up to the expectations of eager sports gamers?
Personally, I enjoy the games that respresent each of the major sports and think that each should be in every self-respecting couch potato's collection. I mean we have to vicariously get some exercise somehow, right? So let's go to the video tape...
NBA Live 06 is perfectly in keeping with the EA sports game formula: make a good and popular game and steadily roll out incremental improvements with every iteration much to the delight of armchair quarterba- err, coaches? It's a very successful formula, actually. Just when you think that they can't add anything new to the game, they up and do just that.
In this case, it's the Freestyle Superstar component of the game play that makes its debut. With this addition, players will notice a special icon above certain star players of just about every team in the NBA indicating their particular skills. For instance, someone like Shaquille O'Neal will be your power guy that - upon taking control of him - can be used to unleash a major dunk on your opponents.
Once you've earned the superstar's abilities in the game, a box displays the particular commands for executing these special moves. This makes it easy for even novice players to get into the game quickly and pull off some pretty sweet moves even if they've never played any of the other games of the NBA Live series. The fact that you have to "build up" to these moves keeps people from exploiting these moves for uneven gameplay. Nice work.
The Dynasty mode allows players to do the typical coaching of a team from one end of the season to the other with a shot at the championship based upon your performance. Hire the best guys for your staff and make sure to scour for good draft picks if you want to take your team all the way the big show.
Throw in the Freestyle Challenge and the All-Star Weekend and you get a great reason for sitting down with a couple of friends and doing some of the biggest trash-talking this side of the East/West Coast rap scene. Especially when you consider that you can take that action online to the entire world, you are surely in for a hell of a fun time as you bring the ballin' skillz to pay your smart mouth's billz. You dig?
The two camps that always hem and haw the loudest with every new iteration of these games are the arcade style and simulation votaries. Arcadey types will enjoy the relatively easy learning curve, while simulation types will appreciate the more subtle controls available to those that desire to learn them. For instance, the fact that there are now two (count ‘em, two) shoot buttons for your players ably demonstrates the depth that EA tried to put in place for the more advanced players to show off.
Basically, you can either make a regular shot when you’re farther away from the basket, or when up close, go for the crowd-pleasing dunks the NBA likes to dish out. There are of course the usual alley-oop passes and other such team-based offensive moves for dazzling your friends, but EA managed to pack lots of little extras into the button layout of the Xbox controller to make for more of a television production-level game play. All in all, the updates to the game work well, especially online with friends.
While I don’t have the patience for the coaching modes for most sports games, I can see how the raw materials for such excursions are made available and could provide for an entertaining experience – to those that enjoy that kind of thing.
One of the biggest complaints with the NBA Live games is the way they stack up against Visual Concepts amazing 2K series of games. Now this is a review of Live 06 so I’ll stick to that one game, but even from screenshots, no matter how artfully they’re set up on the backs of the respective game boxes, one can easily see the difference. With the sheer magnitude of resources available to EA, you’d think they could produce some amazing visuals.
I mean, with the 2K series, you get little extras like scenes of the landmarks from the town in which the virtual game is being played. If you’re in San Antonio, for instance, you see a polygonal rendering of the Alamo (reverent pause for us Texans). And just looking at the crowd in the Live series annoys me. They still use that ridiculous 2D sprite-based animated crowd graphic in lieu of Visual Concepts’ [low-res] polygonal crowd shots. It just adds to the experience to see the coach walking around and the other benched players cheering on their teammates.
But in all fairness, the character and arena models look reasonably like their real-world counterparts - even if the players’ heads look freakishly large. And the attempt to make for a quasi-television experience works well considering the lack of a network license.
What I find strange is that the players onscreen will often be seen talking with each other and you have to wonder if the developers saw fit to provide that realism, why not just put some sound to that? There’s no chatter. What gives with that?
Anyway, the usual sound of rubber shoes squeaking on the hardtop and that familiar bouncing ball are all in place, so there’s no problem there. And in a surround sound stereo system environment you’ll feel a lot like you’re at a game. But I’m not a big fan of Marv Albert’s commentary. It just doesn’t pop like it used to – and certainly doesn’t match up to the banter of the 2K series. Still, what needs to be there is there so it’s certainly no deal-breaker.
Fans of the series will most likely find legs in the new content. It’s innovative while familiar and provides for some exciting online play - which is definitely the way to go for any sports game these days. It’s all about trash-talking and showing up your friends in the All-Star Weekend competitions. Nothing beats pulling off some sweet Air Jordan-style moves to the amazement of other Xbox Live onlookers.
Armchair coaches will thrill to the prospect of building an indomitable franchise through careful scouting and training camp sessions, while purveyors of the Freestyle Superstar addition will love planning their moves at the critical moment and unleashing a scoring bonanza on unsuspecting opponents. Nice.
Electronic Arts shows no sign of slowing down as they gobble up anything that gets in their way on the road to total console supremacy. And with the NFL license in the bag, it’s only a matter of time before they take over basketball too. So while I would recommend the 2K series over the EA series just about any day of the week, it would be disingenuous of me to claim that the NBA Live series hasn’t managed to improve with each iteration, finding new innovations to make the experience interesting for those who have yet to be pulled in.
NBA Live 06 is hardly a slam dunk, but considering the game’s features as a whole, it’s at least a pretty good lay-up.