[Bornindamecca]

I'm impressed by a lot of things. I'll give a thorough review later in the week, but here is the main two things about Live.

The Good
Live won a philosophical basketball war. Because of the way their ball handling, player momentum and interior collisions work, you can approach this game with a purely basketball mindset. On offense you're creating space for your jumpers and running sets to get mimsmatches and open players. In the early days of having this game, both online and off, there are no Live-isms to plan around on offense. Same goes for defense. Since there aren't too many ghosting animations, you can look at what hand the offensive player has the ball in, do a mental check of his skill set, and then guard him accordingly. Because open jumpers go in at a high clip, percentages and numbers can start to reflect real life. Like real jumpshooters, you start to think you can make anything in this game. Try to live off of a steady diet of stepbacks, and you'll soon remember: "live by the jumper..." and you know how the rest goes. Everything about the jumpshooting in Live is brilliant. The jumpshot mechanics, the cause and effect of defending it, and the success rate of open jumpers make this the best that jumpshooting has every been in a basketball game. Not just jumpshooting as a mechanic, but jumpshooting as a role in an offense. Bravo to that.

The Bad
Rebounding, Post Up and Loose Ball logic. These elements need the same overhaul that shooting, dribbling, passing, and man to man defense got.

The Ugly
There are some aesthetic issues with Live. Without getting too into art-nerd talk, I'll say that Live has a severe philosophical shortcoming in every visual aspect. The game is made to be seen up close first, and far away second. The color, the proportions, the animations, the likenesses, the lighting and the textures all follow this thinking, and that's responsible for every visual complaint your hear about Live. This needs to be inverted for Live to reach its visual potential.

As great as Icon Player Control and Freestyle passing are, the normal directional passing has given me some truly puzzling results. Not sure how the logic to this is worked out, but there were times I passed in a direction nearly opposite the player I was aiming for. Hopefully this can be tweaked with a patch.


Missing In Action
The Live team made great strides, but time is a cruel mistress, and fans will notice a big gap in terms of features, visual subtleties and 3rd tier gameplay elements, like defensive offball control amongst other things. I hope that while they are working on the Post Game, Rebounding and Off Ball defense next year, the Live Development Team can find the time to fill these holes to flesh out the experience.

Innovations
Kudos for Freestyle Passing, Icon Player Control, Pick and Roll Controls and another year of DNA innovation(Dynamic Season, anyone?)