Xbox

NBA Live 2002

The game is awesome. There are not many words to describe the game, but awesome covers pretty much all of them. Sure, Sega Sports may have a good NBA game out, and Microsoft just released their NBA Inside Drive 2002 for the Xbox, but there’s always room for EA Sport’s NBA title. If you’re not too sure about EA Sports, then I suggest you go rent this game and see how much fun you have.

The Xbox version of NBA Live 2002 is almost a carbon copy of the PlayStation 2 edition but seeing how much the PS2 got right this year, that’s not a bad thing at all. Gamers are still in for the most realistic-looking game of Live ever created. The player models and animations in NBA Live are simply jaw-dropping. The announcers, Don Poier and Bob Elliot, call the game with reserved energy, but it’s easy to get lost on the Xbox controller.

NBA Live 2002 on the Xbox is plagued by many of the same issues as the PlayStation 2 version. The lack of actual zone sets is unforgivable, as it completely ignores an essential aspect of this year's NBA game. The rebounding game, which wasn't very strong to begin with, has taken a hit, as the control schemes for both rebounding and facing up on a player are utterly counterintuitive. As with the PS2 version, there are new presentation elements, and the new franchise mode adds quite a bit of replay value, but NBA Live 2002 seems to be falling behind competing hoops products on the market and didn't improve much in moving to the Xbox.

Un bon jeu de basket mais pas forcément ultime non plus. Il reste à l'image de la version PS2 en se contentant de faibles innovations et de quelques améliorations sur le plan visuel. Le gameplay ne subit que d'infimes changements avec tout au plus une manette qui ne vient pas arranger les défauts de ce titre comme les interceptions agaçantes et les fautes à répétition.

NBA Live 2002 sur Xbox se contente malheureusement de n'être qu'une simple adaptation de la version PlayStation 2, aussi n'attendez rien de nouveau dans ce jeu. Outre le fait qu'on retrouve le même gameplay pourtant sujet à de nombreuses critiques, le jeu semble ne vouloir faire aucun effort pour s'améliorer autrement que graphiquement vis à vis des précédentes éditions. La seule satisfaction vient de la licence officielle des effectifs mis à jour, mais il ne fait pratiquement aucun doute que des titres comme NBA Inside Drive 2002 et NBA 2K2 viendront dominer de la tête et des épaules cet assez triste volet.

So in short what is NBA Live. It's an average basketball game, it does some things good but does more insufficient. There are some features that I hope other game take from Live but Live needs to take many more to compete with the likes of Inside Drive and NBA 2k2. It's defiantly not as bad as some reviewers make it out to be but when EA Sports doesn't try to improve this franchise I can see why so many are disgusted with it as you should be. If this game was the first edition of Live I'd give it better marks but since EA Sports doesn't feel the need to improve it, I'm going to have to drop the score lower than I normally would. Do yourself a favor and experience better basketball with Inside Drive or NBA 2k2.

NBA Live 2002 does some things right, like graphics (to an extent), dunking, and the extras, but it does so many things wrong that detract heavily from the overall experience. The goal of a basketball game, especially a simulation, is to capture the fun, excitement, realism and strategy that is involved in a real-life basketball game, but NBA Live 2002 fails to do so in many respects. Unless you can look past the AI, control, and gameplay flaws, playing through a season will become impossible because after a few games you just lose interest. Here's to hoping next year's Live iteration will address many of the franchises current slew of problems before other improvements are made. Without a strong foundation, what's the use of putting up a building?

NBA Live 2002 lets you create-a-player, but they forgot to put some sort of cap on just how good that player can be from the get-go. You can crank his abilities to high heaven, leading to a 7-foot point guard with 30-foot range and tighter handles than Iverson. It sort of takes the edge out of cultivating a created player through the season.