Review: NBA 2K10

The Digest: The King is back.  Several new layers of realism have been added to create the best basketball experience to ever make it to the console.  While some minor technical issues hold this title back from reaching it’s full potential, this 10th anniversary edition is the basketball game to own.

THE FACT SHEET

RELEASE DATE: October 6th, 2009
PUBLISHER: Visual Concepts
DEVELOPER: 2K Sports
ESRB RATING: “E” for Everyone
GENRE: Sports Simulation
PRICE: $59.99

PRODUCT OVERVIEW:
NBA 2K10 is raising the bar again with another Championship season.  Featuring Kobe Bryant, reigning Finals MVP as the cover athlete,  you’ll experience all-new gameplay components, out-of-this-world graphics, even more realistic Signature Style animations, all-new presentation elements and an unrivaled online system — this season you won’t just play the NBA, you’ll Take over.

PRODUCT FEATURES:

• NBA Today – All the real world matchups, news and stats are automatically streamed right into your game.  No longer will your commentary and overlays be stale and out of date
• My Player Mode – Create the ultimate NBA player and guide his every career move
• Living Rosters - Allow you to keep NBA 2K10 fresh with up-to-date team with real player information, including roster and lineup moves, trades, injuries and player ratings via interactive menus and analysis
• Seamless Online Experience
• Shut Down D – Shut down teams like never before with innovative defensive controls.

When it comes to gaming, this is the week I look forward to most.  My favorite annual release, NBA 2K, finally hits the shelves.  Since its inception 10 years ago, 2K Sports has dominated the basketball genre.  In light of this 10 year milestone, 2K Sports went all out to create the most immersive and realistic Basketball game to date.

So, NBA Today is the big new feature 2K Sports is touting.  Using a dynamic new system, you’ll hear fresh commentary come from Kevin Harlan and Clark Kellogg instead of the same old recycled lines that you’re used to hearing on most sports’ titles.  This certainly lives up to its billing as I found myself loving the extra layer of realism this brought to the game.  It’s almost as if you were watching it on TV.  Periodically, stat overlays and upcoming games will show up.  Not to mention, if you’re connected to XBL, the broadcasters will talk about stats from previous games and news from around the actual NBA.  There’s no doubt in my mind that this new system will be emulated from all around for years to come.  Everything about the way they present the game is near perfect.  The overlays are very sleek and clean, making information easier to absorb.  Even subtle touches, like adding holiday banners for games on Halloween or Christmas up the ante.  Pre and post game animations are spot on, along with all the other animations.  Signature style has been a cornerstone of the franchise and it shows no signs of slowdown with an even wider set of packages.  A new set of flashy animations have also been added, like behind the head passes and swim moves.  They play out great on screen and look even better when you see them from new angles during highlight replays.

2K Sports appears to be making an emphasis toward simulation/realism.  The play calling menu has been vastly expanded.  Now you get your standard Quick Plays along with a set of 4 designed for each position.  This brings the total to 24 plays available.  I absolutely love this expanded playcall menu as I now have a large variety of go to plays when I need to score.

One of the first things I noticed was that the passing mechanics have been retooled.  On my first defensive rebound, I attempted to throw up a long pass from my center to a streaking Dwyane Wade, only to watch the ball sail over his head and out of reach as it bounced out of bounds.  Even good passers, like Jose Calderon, from time to time will miss what should be an easy chest pass to an open player.  This still doesn’t change the easy passing into the paint.  I found myself consistently hitting cutting teammates rolling to the hoop.  You’ll see a slight percentage bump in the amount of passes that get broken up, but not enough to make you not worry about the exploit potential this will garner online.

Stamina will have a far greater impact on both the players and the game.  You can no longer abuse the turbo like in years’ past.  An energy meter is below each of the players that indicate the amount of boost and stamina he has.  The yellow meter is your turbo, and when that runs out you will start to burn off some serious stamina.  Now you have to really pace your players and know when to push the fastbreak or walk the ball up and run a set play.

The controls have been retooled to make it more user friendly.  They’ve also included a new set of moves for you to use.  Adding to the realism, they’ve included some dirty moves into your arsenal.  If you’re feeling your inner Bruce Bowen, you can now flop or grab a player’s jersey.  This certainly makes things more interesting as you can take advantage of referee sight lines to pull off some questionable tactics.  Also, when you engage another player by pushing into him, whether it be on offense or defense, it lends itself to a number of new moves for you to work with.  For instance, you can do swim moves around defenders and push off for shots or even spin out for lobs with Dwight Howard.

When it comes to sport games, I am a simulation purist.  While the default sliders aren’t tuned exactly to my liking, that’s what they’re there for, right?  Everyone plays and views the game differently.  Some people may feel some things are too easy and some are too hard.  With that being said, the overall balance is there.  Shooting is more or less the same.  I’ve noticed that wide open players have a far higher percentage of hitting their shots as long as its reasonably within range.  I also saw some terrible shooters hitting wide open baseline jumpers too, which became frustrating knowing their actual shooting skill.  Offensively, the AI has seen some improvements.  You will notice players move far better without the ball, cutting to the hoop and setting picks/screens.  Defensively, however, things are a bit different.  From my standpoint, inside scoring is still entirely too easy.  I consider myself a defensive stalwart and post defense is no easy task.  In turn, with the plethora of offensive moves at your disposal, scoring points in the post are easy to rack up.  Big men get torn up one on one in the low post against players with above average post offense.  I also found AI teammates sliding over to help when it wasn’t necessary, constantly leaving good shooters wide open in the corners.  I had to push the double team slider to 0 and turn double team on each player off.

I’m glad they did away with the glue-like lock-on-D feature and replaced it with what they call “Intense D”.  While it remains the same in concept, you no longer stick to the opposing player and have to actually work to play defense instead of relying on the computer to do most of it for you.  Now you won’t see Shaq shadow Derrick Rose as he drives from the arc into the paint.  It does allow you to get up real tight on another player to fight for position or deny driving lanes.  The ability to truly shut down an opponent will never be an easy task though.  As the saying goes in basketball, good offense trumps good defense.

While it may not be universally recognized, 2K definitely took some time to work on resistance and it is wholly appreciated.  Whether it be denying the ball, fighting for position or backing down an opponent, there’s a feeling of push and pull between players.  Bullying opponents down into the paint shows a level of polish like never before.

It’s pretty hard to top the gorgeous visuals from 2K9.  While they have certainly been improved, I wouldn’t say that there’s an immense difference.  At least this time around the head coaches bare a slight, and I emphasize slight, resemblance to their counterparts.  The arenas in NBA 2K are, in my opinion, the most detailed and best looking venues in any sports title.  The amount of attention and detail paid to everything from the crowd to the seats are astounding.  At the same time, this may be one of the downfalls of the game.  I noticed the framerate problem from 2K9 only happened in certain venues, and I theorized that it was because of the amount of detail put into certain buildings.  Well the framerate issue is back, and again, only happens at certain venues.  Hopefully they have a patch lined up to fix this.

My Player is the first career mode to make it into this series.  You start off playing in the Summer League and going through team workouts as you build up your player.  Then it’s off to either the D-League or straight to the pros.  While not perfect, it is a solid new feature that shows a lot of promise.  I’m curious to see how much further they develop this mode.

The online experience has seen some great enhancements.  Challenging and inviting others into a multitude of gaming modes has been streamlined a great deal.  Ease of use and social gaming were certainly the focus for this years online mode and they pulled this off flawlessly.  You can now put together “crews” to challenge others to see who dominates the court.

The Association Mode (a.k.a. Franchise Mode) is where I usually get the most mileage out of this game, aside from playing online of course.  Everything is more or less the same with the exception of one large new addition.  You can now call up players from your associated D-League team and let them run with your squad.  A welcome add-on, this greatly enhances one of the better Franchise modes in sports games.  However, there are of course some gripes I have with  some of the changes made.  I don’t like the fact that you can’t turn off autosave in Association.  It can be frustrating at times and I hope that the developers will remedy this with a patch.  The most disappointing for me is something that plagued this mode last year, which was the player salaries.  Sadly, this has not been fixed, but at least adjusting salaries is faster so you don’t have to wait 10 minutes to drop someone down a few million dollars.  They also limited the player development drills a bit.  You no longer have the option to develop a players 3 point shot.  This is definitely a step back in that area as I was hoping for some new drills to work with and not less than last year.

I must admit, I’m pretty torn over the new rating scale.  It’s good that they spread out the ratings so there’s a far better range.  Now you’ll regularly see players in the 70’s range and even players well under 60.  However, when basing this off of a numbers standpoint, Superstars are far superior to even a borderline All-Star caliber player.  Still, while the ratings didn’t exactly reflect what I deemed to be their skill level, each of the players played as I expected them too.

For some reason, substitutions do not register quickly or at all.  This is really, really annoying.  When you make a sub, you want it to immediately reflect your on court lineup when there is a stoppage in play.  I constantly found myself having to redo subs and call unnecessary timeouts since a needed switch was not made.  Your adjustments appear to always happen the following stoppage in play after you’d like it to happen.

I briefly went over the new Menu system in my NHL 2K10 review.  While it looks really nice, because I was unfamiliar with the new layout, I wasn’t the biggest fan.  Mainly because I didn’t know where everything was, so I wasn’t able to quickly navigate through it.  After spending some time with it, it’s grown a bit on me.  Once you know where everything is, you can navigate faster than ever before.

Conclusion: With an emphasis on realism, 2K Sports has taken it up a notch.  Whether subtle or drastic, the new changes take you even closer to bringing the hardwood to your console.  This is by far the best basketball game I have ever played and can only see new versions in this series getting better.  I welcome any and all challengers (I’ll be back on XBL soon), leave a comment if you think you have what it takes.

Single Player: 9/10 | Multi-Player: 9/10

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