NBA Live 08

This is a big year for NBA Live. In addition to being the third offering for Xbox 360, NBA Live 08 will be the first major basketball series to land on Nintendo Wii. That's huge news for Nintendo fans, as the Wii is currently without a b-ball champ.

Once again, PSP owners will have a one-on-one duel for basketball supremacy. While the PS3 and 360 market is crowded, PSP has just one baller besides NBA Live – Sony's NBA series. The battle will be tough, with flashy box art sending gamers in one direction and our past experience with both series sending us in another. For many years, NBA Live was king. It hasn't performed well on PSP, but EA has come back to address many of the technical issues that have plagued the much-anticipated handheld editions. Unfortunately, that's about all that was done before the game was cleared for manufacturing.

Seamlessness – Sort Of

When fans cried that NBA Live 07 was technically flawed, EA didn't cover its ears. The studio took notes, increased the frame rate, added a few more polygons, and formed a game that feels much better.

In many ways it's superior to the PS2 version, which still doesn't play right, especially when compared to other EA-made sports games (such as NHL 08, whose controls are quite good on PS2). If you don’t like NBA 08’s challenging shot indicator, try NBA Live 08. Its shooting mechanics are impossible to fail. You may use the wrong guy for the shot, or take a shot when you should have been running. But the shooting itself is foolproof. Seriously, there is nothing to it – press the circle button and watch the ball fly. Without a shot indicator requiring the player to time his shots, you don't need to spend much time thinking. This is a game of taking action, nothing more.

Players will quickly notice that the 08 update isn't as sluggish as last year’s game. There aren't as many hiccups, nor do the players perform with as many awkward movements. You'll still spot the occasional lockup where a player stands off the side and shakes lightly, indicating that the AI can't determine where the player is supposed to be headed. And the game still bores you with frequent logo screens in between plays, where it pops up for two seconds in between plays. This is used as a transition piece on the console versions. But here it doesn't feel like a transition piece – it's annoying and kills the game's consistency.

The Crown

The Crown is an extended way of tracking your success in each game mode. It provides several statistical notes, such as point totals and averages for the number of points scored, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, fouls, turnovers, field goal attempts, field goals made, three-point attempts, three-points made, and so on. The number of games played, won, and lost are also calculated.

The Crown takes your achievements – performing well and whatnot – and tacks them onto a rank meter. When the rank meter fills, you go up one rank. Achievements are everywhere in the game. You can earn rank points by winning games, by scoring a specific number of points, by winning challenges ("score 12 points with player X in the fourth quarter" – the kind of thing Sony's NBA series has been doing for the past three years), etc.

 
Don’t be fooled: these screenshots are not from the PSP edition –
 they're from the vastly superior next-gen versions.

NBA Live 08's ability to address the issues of last year's game is respectable. The rest of the content, however, is not. If you skipped Live 07, this might feel like a solid, brand-new package. But if you've been with the series for a while, you will probably be disappointed.

Gameplay: 6.7
NBA Live 08 gets a "B+" for polish, a "C-" for content, and a "D" for longevity. You could say that this is the game we should have had with NBA Live 07 (back when some of the content was fresh). But it's what we received today, a year later, and without any standout elements to make the fans go crazy.

Graphics: 7.8
At first glance, NBA Live 08 looks great. The player models are excellent and the widescreen showcase crams more onto the screen than most PSP sports offerings. Unfortunately, the game falters with jarring side transitions and screen / player lockups. The slow load times in between games and menus don't help.

Sound: 6.8
The commentary is decent but somewhat repetitive. You’ll hear the same lines too frequently, and the licensed music is terribly unvaried and uninspired.

Difficulty: Easy
There isn’t a great balance here. Opponents are either easy or cheap.

Concept: 6.9
NBA Live 08 removes most of last year's issues but fails to introduce any new or exciting gameplay features. The Go To moves are only cool if you care about a player's signature style – if you just want great basketball gaming, you're going to be disappointed.

Multiplayer: 6.0
Same as last year’s game, which was solid back then but doesn’t do much when thrown into NBA Live 08.

Overall: 6.8
More polished than last year's game, you'd think NBA Live 08 would be a winner. The programmers deserve some credit for making what was once a console exclusive run smoothly on a handheld system. However, it's not that exciting of a game. Most of the modes are old, and the mini-games fail to build enthusiasm. If you love EA's style of basketball and have yet to play the series on PSP, you’re better off now than you would have been last year. But if you’re one of the many who played the series in 06, you should probably wait till the next update before coming back to Live.