NBA Live 2003

Pros • It's the one NBA game where you can create yourself and just put yourself on your favourite team--though you'll still probably end up a free agent traitor playing against yourself at some point • Amazing close camera work captures all of the graphics and flashy play • It's fast, and it's fun • Online roster updates • Great sense of game flow, with alternate runs by competing teams • Absolutely brilliant use of the right thumbstick "freestyle control" • Custom soundtrack CD included with the game	Cons • Too much celebrating after every shot by every player • Pathetic manual • Close camera lets you see the clunky defense and players sliding around the floor • There really should be an automated player substitution option like there is in EA Sports' NHL games to get subs in without having to stop and pause the game to do it yourself • Encourages ball hog, end-to-end rushes, especially in online play • Easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle than it is for NBA Live 2003 to cram all of its glossy, high-poly-count graphics through your modem for online play • AI needs more game smarts (how about fouling at the end of a game when down one, just for one example) • No EA Sports cards?
Bottom Line NBA Live 2003 is the quickest, easiest and most fun to play NBA game this year--heck ever! It is definitely the one to play for quick matches between friends. If, however, you are into "simulating" b-ball and playing whole seasons, think twice. NBA Live 2003 makes a stunning first impression. It comes with a customized EA Sports basketball soundtrack, flashes its fabulous graphics up close and personal with amazingly effective camera work, and has the most exciting player control ever devised for a sports game. Using the right thumbstick for "freestyle" or "total player" control--confusingly, it is called both in the game--you can stutter-step, hesitate, juke, cross over, swat at the ball, spin and step back, and know, all the while, that you, you truly are the one in control, not the whimsy of the pre-programmed moves and animations of some corrective-glasses-wearing code-monkey. It is more fun than basketball has ever been. But, this is no basketball sim. Every player is as hyped as Allen Iverson (Sega, who has Iverson on their more traditional basketball game, should trade EA, who has Jason Kidd on the cover of NBA Live 2003), everything moves at lightning speed, and the more you play NBA Live 2003, the more you realize it encourages just handing the ball to your best ball-handler to shake and bake your way to the rim every single solitary time down the court, and just selecting a shot blocker to play get-it-outta-here defense. I guess you could say that NBA Live 2003 is a bit of a hot-dog.

For pick-up-and-play fun, NBA Live 2003 simply can not be beat. Within minutes of picking up a controller, anyone with the smallest amount of ball and court sense will be busting out amazing moves with EA Sports' new freestyle control scheme. It is quite simply the most fun control innovation, perhaps ever, in sports gaming. Using the right thumbstick to control your moves finally makes the gamer feel in control, not at the mercy of whatever "special moves" the game developers have programmed to the "crossover" or "spin" button with the player you are using. You can literally invent your own moves on the fly to the hoop.

Plus, you never feel out of an NBA Live 2003 game. You can be down by fifteen and put on a spurt of quick hoops and blocked shots, swing the momentum and claw back in, just the way you can see your own ten-point lead evaporate to a little bout of lost concentration or show-boating. The momentum swings of this game are a real part of its excitement.

And, the amazing, close-up camera work of the EA Sports team gives you an amazing view of all the excitement, so close and personal that you can hardly believe that you can have the court vision you need. Defense is also fun; charges and blocked shots abound. Downloadable roster updates, the ability to create yourself as a player on your favourite team in franchise mode without worrying about stupid salary caps, all-star teams from the past, and lots of just plain fun on-the-court action make NBA Live 2003 an absolutely brilliant game to have around for when your friends come calling.

But, the more you play NBA Live 2003, the more you begin to notice things. If you're at all old-school, you'll start to get annoyed by the celebration after every basket--especially if you're playing the old-time all-stars, who you know would never hot-dog like the current crop of NBA superstar brat/punks. The close camera lets you see how defensive players are sliding around the court--basketball defense remains difficult: if you're programming a hockey or football, or even a baseball game, for that matter, you just calculate the physics of rapidly moving, heavy players colliding, but in basketball, a so-called non-contact sport, you have to figure out how to model the high-speed, low-contact battles for space that take place on a hardwood court, yet still allow real collisions where they are called for; very difficult. As you search for more depth to the game, you'll be terribly annoyed by the flimsy manual that fails to teach you how to take advantage of all of the things in the game--for example, there are tons of plays and offenses you can choose, but they are nowhere explained. If you follow the game, you may know the difference between a triangle, flex and high post or motion offense, but you'd have to be a serious hoop-head to know the difference between zipper 5 and zipper 6. And, while all of the other EA Sports games use cards to provide extra challenges that keep you interested in playing, and rewarding you with extra unlockables, NBA Live 2003 has none.

The more you play, the more you begin to feel like NBA Live 2003 is total chaos. The rapid pace of the game and the ease of getting to the hoop with any good ball handler, tend to degenerate the game into a series of hot-dogging end-to-end rushes, especially if you ever play any online games.

Sadly, NBA Live 2003 seems too media-rich to squeeze into the gaming heaven of online play. Even with my cable modem, playing only other players with connections better than mine, chop, chop, chop goes the frame rate; pop, stutter, stutter, goes the gameplay.

You'll note the diminishing enthusiasm of this review. This parallels the diminishing fun you'll have with NBA Live 2003. The initial high you'll get--and I mean high, wow! it's fun at first; you might actually come out of your chair in excitement--at discovering the absolutely brilliant "freestyle" control and amazing graphic and camera work, diminishes slowly as you play the game long enough for it to show you, with the brilliant close-up camera, its flaws. The fun of showing it to someone else for the first time will never diminish; so, if you are the type of basketball gamer who mostly plays with your friends around the same console, NBA Live 2003 is the best thing that ever happened to you. But, if you are the type of gamer who plays entire seasons, and/or wants to play online against others, there are other, better, basketball games for your money.

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