NBA Live 10

EA's NBA Live is back again this year trying to dig itself out of a hole it has been mired in since the birth of the Dreamcast ten years ago. For those keeping score at home, Live has been trying to gain our attention with stiff player animations, lousy AI and poor play mechanics (seriously? I need two shoot buttons?) for a decade.

THE VERDICT by Tae K. Kim Tae K. Kim's Avatar Ouch. It looks like the EA machine stumbled a bit with NBA 10. While 2K's effort is getting raves, NBA 10 clocks in with a middling score. Hopefully, this motivates the dev team to go back to the drawing board and get their gameplan in order.

ALSO READ: Our NBA 2K10 Review!

I dog the Live series a lot, and that's because the 2K series has always been a far better representation of real NBA action in my opinion. Fortunately, the guys at EA Canada have obviously started to take exception to being the second stringers in the realm of virtual basketball, because this year's Live is actually a really encouraging step forward for the series.

YES!!!

Live 10 is without question the best looking game of the series to date, the players run well, off the ball action is fairly consistent and arenas are recreated with near perfect detail down to individual player warm up routines -- like Wade's pull ups and LeBron's powder shower thing that gets the kids in Cleveland all geeked. Players will try to get open and when you're moving down the court for a set play, there will be players improvising around defenders and jockeying for position on the boxes.

I really can't say enough about how impressive the overall aesthetic of NBA Live 10 is, even down to the crowds, which really are regarded as nothing more than background noise, they seem to move almost as well and as independently as the players! The focus on atmosphere really shines through with this attention to detail, as rivalry games and playoff games become a circus and brings the vibe of professional basketball to life. As a Sixers fan, this is excellent news for me, as I haven't seen professional basketball since roughly 2002.

RE-JECTED!!!

There's a certain reverence for the culture around basketball, there is an incredible abundance of shoes, jerseys and other specific details that just scream out the passion that EA Canada has put into this project. However, I can't help but think that had more time been spent on the gameplay, I'd be singing the praises of a good basketball video game and not a good basketball video montage.

NBA Live 10
NBA Live 10

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