NBA Live 07 : Review
I’ll try to make this quick. Basically, the NBA Live team at EA Sports managed to turnover the ball again this year. How many TOs do they want on their stat sheet? It’s only a matter of time before we compare them to the young “White Chocolate” J Willie. I don’t know how they can proudly advertise this game with their TV commercials. Madden 07 on the other hand is a worthy game that deserves it’s television air time during commercials and directly on ESPN. I wonder to myself how one development team can so badly outmatch another at the same company. You’d think after a while they would try to learn from the other team and balance out their mistakes. Sadly for the NBA Live series this is not true. Another year for us PC gamers to have to sit through terrible back end mistakes that should be easily fixed over the years. I stopped caring about graphics ever since NBA Live 2003 which only suffered from gameplay problems. It seems to me that gameplay is the least of their concerns at EA Sports.
The bad : You thought the dynasty mode would see the most improvement since it is about time we should see it mature to Madden form, but no. Instead the rookie draft is still horrible, you’re never going to get a decent player. The trading is impossible since teams will never make reasonable trades and you can’t offer money bonuses. You thought you’d see better game play balancing, but no. We still have the AI grabbing every offensive rebound time and time again. Setting up plays that are unstoppable, even when tightly defended they still make the impossible fading shot from past the 3-point line. You thought the freestyle incorporation would get better but no. I think it’s infact worse since the characters seem to respond to the right analog slower than the button function from last year. We thought freestyle would give us better ball control maybe some nice dribble moves, I haven’t seen any improvements. In fact, there is an inability to use the freestyle stick to transition to dribbling the ball in the pivot position. In NBA Live 06 you could jab and pivot in the triple threat position then blow by your man with some quick first step moves. For some reason that was removed from this generation giving the player less ball control abilities.
The good : I’m surprised that the guys at EA sports could not have made improvements to any larger aspects of the game. Instead they decide to focus on smaller bits and pieces. One of which is that there are a couple nice animations. Some nice freestyle moves, shots and blocks that were not in the previous generation. Also the seperation of the dunk and layup buttons allows you to choose when its appropriate to jam one in or use some finess. Also the ability to throw a lob pass when you actually want to reduces the amount of interceptions when passing into the post.
Aside from these small updates there are loads of things that need work and judging by their annual progress you probably won’t see much getting done for NBA Live 08. Actually, we really should be thinking that since they recieved flunking ratings from IGN, Gamespot and the rest that they’ll either lose their license to make NBA games or will finally dump the project and start from scratch. The last alternative is hoping that NBA 2k will be kind enough to release a PC version in the near futire.
