E3 2012: NBA Live Returns - IGN
You've Come This Far...
Coming back from major reconstructive surgery, but will it be Grant Hill or Greg Oden?
Mike Breen and JVG do the commentary, but we admit we miss Marv Albert.
It’s good to see NBA Live return after a two-year hiatus, because it’s hard not to feel a bit bad for the developers behind the EA’s long-running sim-basketball series. Everything that could go wrong for them did in 2010. Their last entry, the briefly rebranded NBA Elite 11, was canceled mere days before its scheduled release -- but not before a bug-ridden playable demo was made public on Xbox Live Marketplace and mocked on YouTube. Then their major competitor, NBA 2K, dropped their best version yet that also featured Michael Jordan on the cover and had His Airness playable in a Hall of Famer-packed Legends mode. It sold millions of copies and left NBA Live with a difficult hill to climb upon its return. It was essentially a perfect storm of awfulness for EA’s NBA property, but to their credit, they’ve picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and are getting back on the court.
is, by new developer EA Tiburon’s own admission, being pieced together using the best EA Sports technology that’s already being leveraged in the publisher’s other established sports brands. Chief among them is ANT, an animation system that promises to never lock you into a canned animation. You might start to make a move and then change your mind, and instead of being helplessly left to see how that animation plays out, you’ll instead be able to pass out of the move or put up a shot.
The Knicks are relevant again everyone! Whoda thunk it?
Speaking of shooting, NBA Elite’s confounding stick-shot controls are being given their unconditional release, and the developers confirmed that we’ll again be doing all of our dribble moves with the right thumbstick, moving with the left stick, and shooting with face buttons. Yes, the trusty Freestyle controls are back! Meanwhile, EA Tiburon aims to make the post game fun, turning it into a sort of fighting game-style mini-battle in which both the offensive player and defensive player each have moves that can be countered by the other guy. For instance, your controller will vibrate if, as the post player, the defender is leaning on you, thus cueing you into a possible spin counter-move. Visually, a revamped graphics engine has players looking better than ever before. A whopping 100 man-hours have gone into each pro’s head alone, and signature styles such as free-throw routines, jumpers, and dribble moves will all be accurately depicted. Still, the overall look of the game is decidedly lacking at this admittedly early stage, with cartoony animations and, worse, the same hyper-speed, arcade-y gameplay pacing that we docked the last NBA Live for. Again, however, NBA Live 13 has plenty of time left on the shot clock to execute its play. We look forward to seeing what it’s got we get the controller in our hands.
Ryan McCaffrey has been covering the Xbox world for 10 years. He used to own a DeLorean, which is weird. , catch him on , and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.
IN THIS ARTICLE
NBA Live 13
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