With all the hype surrounding EA Sports and their exclusive licenses, I figured why not do a few reviews of their more popular releases in the US. We’ll start off with NBA Live 06. Did they live up to the expectations of longtime fans of this series, or did they let the ball roll out of bounds? The game seems promising at first, with their All Star Weekend feature being the most attractive feature of all. Factor in one of the most successful game production companies in Electronic Arts and you seemingly have a home run. Unfortunately, this game hits a double at best. With some overlooked details and what seems like a lack of attention in general for this installment, EA definitely lost it’s dribble so to speak. Pros: All Star Weekend. Whether it’s the Dunk Contest, 3-Point Shootout, Rookie/Sophomore Challenge or the All Star Game itself you can partake in it. In-depth dynasty mode lets you control many facets of an NBA franchise. Online play for the Xbox and PS2 is a pretty nice feature to have, play against others across the globe (globally not recommended because of lag) and see how high you can be ranked. Create-a-player, but then again, what sports game doesn’t have this nowadays? Cons: Graphics are really lacking in this game. After playing this seasons Madden, I was really expecting more from EA Sports here. Everything in here except the players, being the most important part in my book, look alright. Player models. For some reason, the geniuses over at EA decided that NBA players are going anorexic now, even Shaq looks slim in this game. They made the players disproportionate, so that smaller guys look about 6’4” and are stacked but taller/larger players look tall and lanky. The court looks overly crowded at times because of this, so it throws you off at first. Loading times are atrocious to say the least. I don’t even bother creating a player because it takes an excessive amount of time to just load a facial feature, even small ones like hair. Actual game loads are reasonable, but I’ll cover that next. Game loads to sum it up. It’ll randomly freeze while loading a game, so unless you save your franchise or roster before every game/event you’re going into you’re going to lose some progress. Also, don’t listen for the music to freeze because that’ll just keep playing. Which brings me to my next con… The soundtrack is just terrible. Yet again, those large brained intellectuals at EA show their stuff by assuming everyone that plays their game loves crappy rap songs. Don’t get me wrong, I can handle rap, hell I have an entire Jay-Z CD on my play list, but this is terrible. There’s about 5 or 6 songs on the entire game that I can think of off the cuff, each one worse than the last. Crummy hooks on top of even crappier beats is just a complete mess up. The only decent track came from Fort Minor with remember the name. For a taste of the greatness, check out this song here: M.I.A. – Bucky Done Gun. There really isn't anything in this game that keeps you interested for an extended amount of time. It grows old after about 2 hours of play, and that's being generous. So with a score of 6-4 in favor of the Con's, this game gets a score of 7.5/10. I'll be putting up a review of Madden NFL 06 in a little bit, so check back for that shortly. A review of this season's MVP Baseball will also be up at a later time once I get that game.
very nice Axiom, in depth and nice use of metaphors in your first to paragraphs. Myself i dont like EA sport games mainly cause the suck. but o well nice review <3
It is pretty good, but I know for a fact that EA Sports could've done a LOT better. Guess that's why I'm so hard on it.
