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NBA Live 2007
How does this year's basketball effort by EA stack up? A resounding "meh."

Labeled With  Electronic Arts EA NBA Live 07
Written by Josh Lowensohn on Monday, October 23 2006








In many ways, basketball sims are by far my favorite sports video games. They offer a really quick pace, a ton of “characters,” and can provide some really memorable on and offline action. While football often gets the spotlight in EA’s yearly franchises, NBA Live has been around since 1990. Since its inception, the series has undergone an identity crisis as to whether it’s an arcade game or a simulation. In recent years, the driving marketing force behind the Live series has been about making the game realistic. Players have been given their own signature moves, and details like custom athlete shoes have been hard coded as a “features.” Does this new façade of simulation equate to fun? In short no.

NBA Live 07 fails almost immediately as being an enjoyable gaming experience. The menu interface, which is largely borrowed from Madden NFL 07, is flashy, but a tad over-stylized. Despite being well laid out, quick and responsive, the text is often times too small—especially on standard definition TVs. To avoid sounding like a cranky old man, small text menus make me feel like reaching for a pair of bifocals. To befuddle users even more, before even getting to touch the menu, you’re required to watch as this magical, virtual basketball court is constructed (are we in the future?) in order to let a polygonal Tracy McGrady (or whomever you choose as your practice player) shoot around. What purpose does this serve? Well, you get to warm up before a match starts (albeit only for 20-30 seconds), but in the back of my mind I’m thinking “wouldn’t the game load faster if it didn’t have to simultaneously showcase this virtual court right now?”


One of the new features in this year’s title is the ESPN integration. Using the power of the internet, NBA Live pulls SportsCenter radio updates right into the game menu, so you can listen, watch or read the latest in real life news in the NBA or other sports feeds that are available. Unfortunately the ESPN radio feature only pops up in the ESPN menu or in the main game menu, often times keeping you from being able to select custom music until you get into a game. While this is a cool feature, being able to listen to the updates during a game halftime, or being able to toggle them over the in-game commentary, would be a lot better than staring at a menu screen. Watching videos in this mode takes some time to cache and can’t be set to fullscreen, which is a also bit disappointing. These are obviously small oversights for such a new feature, but they would have easily made the ESPN integration less in-your-face and more valuable to the heavy-use player.





Setting up games is relatively easy by going straight to the quick game mode. Load times are fairly short, and you’re in the game. As mentioned before, you get a chance to shoot around with your favorite player for a little more than half a minute before he magically disappears. The team introductions are relatively mundane this year, and to knit pick, hardly capture realistic-looking body movement. They also do one of three things: jump, point, or waive their arms…it’s up to you to guess. Again, not to knit pick, but we’re in next-gen land and the crowd is still filled with the same 10 people all nearly moving at the same time with the same gestures. It looks absolutely terrifying. Not like it matters in the grand scheme of things, but we’re got the polygons, so let’s use ‘em. I suppose it beats the 2K series when it was on Dreamcast, with the one crowd member who unintentionally looked like a man-sized gorilla.

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NBA Live 07


 
 
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4.7
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Player Support (1-4)

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