NBA LIVE 2008 ( what can you expect?)

You don’t need to go far to find someone who hasn’t exactly been impressed with the way the NBA Live series has been mishandled for the past few years. The series had offered a weak feature set on next-gen consoles, and basically poor controls that made playing it a chore. With stiff competition from 2K Sports and their acclaimed NBA 2K franchise, it was time for EA’s basketball series to shape up before it shipped out.

However, the development team in EA Canada has realized these problems, and set out to rebuild the game from the ground up, focusing first on what makes five-on-five basketball just so damn fun. They’ve cleaned up the controls significantly, bumped up the framerate to a silky-smooth 60 frames per second. The most important thing, though, is that NBA Live 08 is actually pretty fun to play.

NBA Live 08 is the most fluid game to hit the series in a long time, if not ever, and that’s thanks in part to some great new on-court moves that are present in the game. The players’ signature moves are more prevalent than ever, making the players feel and act more like their real-life counterparts than ever before. The new “own the paint” feature will allow you to perform a variety of fakes and countermoves depending on how close they are to the basket (adding a great degree of one-on-one intensity against your defender), and the quick strike ball handling really lets you feel like you are actually handling the ball and moving with it while using the right stick to control the handling.

Aside from the changes in the on-court mechanics, the game will have some new features to make things interesting. NBA Live 08 will feature the FIBA World Championship, allowing you to team up NBA teams against other countries like Spain in a championship face-off. There is also a Scenario mode where you can select between a group of variables like score and home team advantage before jumping into a game and taking on your opponent, and a Quick Pick mode that allows you to craft your own dream team of 10 players from across the NBA and take on others.

The biggest new addition to the game’s online component is one that sports fans have been clamoring for a long time to get in any number of sports games: online leagues. Players can choose their team and take on other gamers in a persistent tournament setting, with leaderboards that are constantly changing. 32 players can enter a league and vie for superiority, gaining reputation and higher rankings.

Graphically, the game is pretty impressive and a definite step up from NBA Live 07. The character models are very accurate to their real-life counterparts, not just in terms of facial elements, but body dimensions as well. When you see how Yao Ming can dwarf Tony Parker on the court, then the look makes sense and feels complete. The animations are also done extremely well, and benefit nicely from the game’s 60 fps framerate. The action moves very smoothly, and looks fantastic.

NBA Live 08’s back-to-the-basics approach is a step in the right direction and evidences that Electronic Arts is listening to some of the complaints that players had with its predecessor. Not only that, but the developers are even adding some great new features like the online leagues which should certainly excite some gamers. Stay tuned for a full review of what promises to be a worthy entry to the franchise.