NBA Live 2005 (PC)

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The developer has also made adjustments in other areas. New entry-pass animations have been added, so you'll see guards lobbing balls into the low block or sometimes using a bounce pass to get the ball past a defender. You'll also see new scoop layup and dunk animations around the basket, allowing the more athletic players to fluidly score even when they're pinned behind the backboard or standing directly underneath the basket. The "pro hop" function has been weakened as well, perhaps too much so. Last year, executing the pro hop would push defenders back, often leading to a free dunk. This time around, using the pro hop on a defender will result in an offensive foul or the ball handler losing control of the ball. In fact, it seems as if it's almost impossible to safely execute a jump stop in traffic at all, making it seem all but useless in NBA Live 2005. Finally, freestyle dribbling (using the right analog stick) is now effective only when playing as a guard or a small forward. If you try to execute fancy moves with a clumsy power forward or center, you can expect to lose the ball immediately. Sorry, Dallas Mavericks fans, no more killer crossovers with 7-foot-6-inch Shawn Bradley.

Unfortunately, many of the annoying flaws in previous Live games pop up in Live 2005. Players still have a strange "force field" around them, which makes it easier to stay in front of players but can result in some cheap out-of-bounds calls as you "push" the ball handler toward the sideline or baseline. Players still stop to catch passes instead of continuing to run, so don't expect many real fast breaks off outlet passes or steals. This is doubly troublesome, because defenders seem to recover much too quickly when they're beaten, especially at higher difficulty levels. And when you do manage to get out on a fast break with teammates on your flanks, you'll find that they never finish running toward the basket as they should. Instead, they always pull up at the wing right around the three-point line, which is the opposite of fundamentally sound basketball.

As far as control is concerned, you're going to need an eight-button controller with dual analog sticks to play NBA Live 2005 properly. The freestyle control mode is much more intuitive when using dual analog sticks, as opposed to the keyboard. Additionally, the slam-dunk mode is difficult enough with the controller. Trying to execute complicated dunks with just the keyboard is just about impossible.

Graphically, NBA Live 2005 isn't a whole lot different from last year's game. It looks very good, with extremely detailed player models and a variety of dribbling and shooting animations. Unlike some of the console versions of the game, however, you don't see a steep drop-off in graphical quality between the All-Star Weekend modes and the regular five-on-five game. The game looks sharp in all modes, although the crowd can sometimes look very flat when the camera zooms in on players during replays.

Like last year's edition, NBA Live 2005 features excellent sound. You'll hear crowds cheer and jeer the action on the court, along with the sounds of sneakers squeaking and the ball bouncing on the floor. Rim-rocking dunks sound appropriately powerful, while soft jump shots produce a subdued swish. The celebrated duo of Marv Albert and Mike Fratello make a return in NBA Live 2005, giving the game great play-by-play and color commentary. New to the broadcast team are TNT's Ernie Johnson and Kenny "The Jet" Smith, who handle the announcing during the All-Star Weekend for the dunk contest and the three-point shoot-out. Like Albert and Fratello, they are immediately familiar and likable to most NBA fans, and their more playful and familiar style provides a nice change of pace. There's also a collection of hip-hop tunes from EA Trax, which isn't quite as good as last year's but still fits the basketball theme well.

NBA Live 2005 ships with robust online functionality. You can expect the usual array of features, like ranked ladders, lobbies, news, and chat, as well as a wealth of statistics for both you and your opponents. You can participate in tournaments, or you can just play single matches against players and wager tokens that can be used to unlock items within the game. NBA Live 2005 is fairly stable online, for the most part. Depending on the latency, you'll need to adjust your shot timing to compensate for lag. But if the connection is clean, this isn't a tough adjustment to make.

For better or worse, the dunk contest is the centerpiece of NBA Live 2005's new features, and it's certainly much better implemented here than in the similar mode in ESPN College Hoops 2K4. But it's tough for us to say that the dunk mode really adds a lot of value to the franchise, and it's also likely to prove too difficult for most casual players to fully grasp anyway. Beyond the new implementation of the All-Star Weekend, longtime players of the Live series will enjoy the revamped franchise mode, as well as the incremental tweaks to the basic gameplay, although both aspects of the game still have noticeable flaws. All things considered, NBA Live 2005 is a very good basketball game, but it doesn't advance the franchise as much as we would have hoped.

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