NBA Live 10 Brings Me Back

It has been a very long time since I have played any basketball game for any video game system. In fact, the most recent basketball game I have played on a console, excluding a recent session with NBA Jam for Super Nintendo, was NBA Live ’97 or ’98. Now those were some good basketball games. Scoring over 100 points with Anfernee Hardaway, making a team full of Reggie Millers who did nothing but rain threes all game from half court from being “on fire”, and shoving your opponents to the floor injuring them. NBA Live has come a long way since then.

EA Sports’ latest basketball creation comes to us in NBA Live 10. I have to admit, that I was pretty rusty when it comes to playing basketball games. When I was younger and played Live ’95 and ’97, I never ran plays or even cared, I would just pass it to the open man and drive to the hoop, and if I was double teamed, I would kick it out to the arc for a three. Now that I’m older, I’m actually starting to run the plays to make it feel more like a real game and play the game how it was designed.

One thing that shouldn’t be a surprise to my readers who know me, is that I had to turn the soundtrack off almost immediately. I’m not a fan of rap, and that’s all the soundtrack was. Every now and then, ESPN radio would come on and talk about the latest highlights and even show a ticker at the bottom of the screen with score updates. I thought that was a pretty cool feature. ESPN highlights were also shown on a big screen TV in the background of the shoot around that you can do while you’re loading or just sitting around at the main menu.

I became a little frustrated when I was creating my own player though. Good ol’ number eight was just about the way I liked him when all of a sudden his eyebrows were no longer dark brown; they were blonde! I checked all over the player creation screen and couldn’t find any option to change the color of the eyebrows. I thought maybe changing the color of the hair on his head or even the color of his facial hair would take care of that, but neither had any effect. I ended up deleting the player and starting over. That was a good half hour down the drain.

The gameplay is really good though. It took me a while to adjust to players actually moving around like you would see on TV, and my guy getting posted up on by somebody much bigger causing me to not have as much control since I was being thrown around like a rag doll. I only rented the game for a couple of nights, and I already want to buy it and finish the season I started. The only thing I have to learn is what the names of the plays mean.

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