That’s right folks today we got some hands-on time with NBA 2K10 and it was as good as we thought it would be. Before we jump into what we thought about our time with the game we want to give a big shout out to @broundy, one of the coolest PR people you will ever meet.
This is what I looked like as I went to the hole as Kobe for a vicious finish.
Of course the game looks gorgeous, you can really tell the amount of work that went into the details this year and that is definitely a good thing. The player models are sick, they not only capture their real life counterparts but all the physics stuff is there as well. We didn’t get a chance to see it in action but we talked about NBA Today. NBA Today is the integration of all the real life NBA information including news, matchups and stats directly into your gameplay. Of course this won’t work for Association, but in Exhibition and Online play the commentary will be relevant to what’s really happening in the NBA. So for example if Shaq goes for 40 the night before and you play a game with the Cavs the next day the commentary might mention that or if you are Grizzlies and they are on a 6 game losing streak they might talk about that as well. The whole focus behind NBA Today is to give players as much relevant information as possible in the normal context of the game, so when your online and the player’s stat’s for the season flash up on the screen it won’t be last year’s numbers, it will be up to date statical information made by possible by a partnership between 2K and Stats Inc. As long as you have an internet connection, your commentary and overlays should never be stale. This also feeds into the emphasis on TV style presentation and you will see that in everything from some new camera angles to the fact that if you play on a holiday the game acknowledges it through some kind of custom presentation appropriate for the holiday so you might see turkeys on Thanksgiving or jingle bells at Christmas.
We talked a little bit about “My Player” mode and if you haven’t checked out NBA 2K10 Draft Combine you need to. My Player mode allows you to create your own NBA player and guide his every career move. If you don’t create your guy in NBA 2K10 Draft Combine you will start out as an undrafted rookie in the Summer Circuit and if you put in enough work you “might” get an invite to show what you got an an NBA team’s training camp or you just might end up in the D-League. If you work hard an actually make an NBA roster and then show that you actually belong there then the sky’s the limit, but nobody ever said the road to that would be easy and trust it won’t be. Another cool thing we learned was that when the game start it has picture of Kobe as the background graphic but once you import your player from NBA 2K10 Draft Combine or create your player in “My Player” mode, that graphic changes to a graphic of your player not Kobe because hey its all about you, right?
The Post Game Is Much Improved This Year
Living Rosters is back and better than ever making sure that all the player information, roster and lineup moves, trades, injuries, and player ratings stay as up to date as ever. A big change this year is that now online gameplay is seamlessly integrated into every aspect of gameplay, so no longer is there a separate screen for to go online, from any game mode you can jump online and challenge your friends, you can even allow folks to jump into your franchise for a game and play you, though on the higher levels sometimes the computer is tough enough to beat don’t know if you want to add another person to the mix
. Signature Play is back and this year more than ever before the players in the game will act like there real world counter parts, whether its Lebron and his chalk cloud before games or Kevin Garnett using the pole holding up the rim as his own personal punching bag, its all there.
Something new to NBA 2K10 is Crews. This is a concept that any shooter fan will be familiar with because its very similar to clans you would see in a shooter. You can get together as many as 15 of your friends to be in your crew and create the ultimate online squad, if everyone knows there role there is no telling how far you could go, ZKG might even sponsor a tournament to find out just who has the best crew. The Crews concept is great because let’s say that of your crew only 3 of you are online but you want to get a game on, it will match you up with another crew that only has 3 people so you never have to worry about playing a crew that has more human players than you so its always fair.
Soon This Will Be You Making Your Player Half-Man/Half-Amazing
The control scheme as it relates to dribbling and the post game have been streamlined to make it alot more easy to use and easier for you to more deeply integrate it into your style of play. The defensive controls have been revamped a little to allow you to play better, more realistic defense and this is important as one of the major knocks of both NBA titles is that defense is really non-existent. As a final tidbit before we talk about what happened once we got on the sticks we wanted to let you know the Association is back and deeper than ever before with full incorporation of the NBA D-League. restricted free agency, all new player progression and much more.
So now that we got the formalities out of the way, lets talk about the actual game. So @broundy picked the Cavs, so you know I had to pick the Lakers, its only fair. At this point, we dropped the sticks and just watched the pregrame presentation which looks very authentic to what you would see if you turned to a game on TNT one night. During this part you get some nice statistics for the top players for both teams and depending on who you are playing with you get to see some of the interesting pregame warm up routines and of course while somebody like Lebron will have more of these as far as we know every team has some and lots of them are player specific. Once thought was over, it was finally time to get on the sticks, Xbox sticks at that but I got the hang of it pretty fast. If you don’t look at your hands then the control scheme is almost exactly the same on both consoles. The controls were great and I especially loved the all new simplified Iso motion controls, its looks a lot more natural and realistic because now you should see a lot less turnovers by big men if you use the cross over button because they won’t try to pull off a Kobe or Lebron type crossover, they will do something simpler much closer to what a real big man would do anyway, I mean you don’t see Dirk trying to do Lebron’s “crab” dribble in real life and you won’t in this game either and that’s important for realism.
Your Season Starts October 6th.
It seemed like they had put a lot of work into really redoing a lot of the shot animations so that there is more variation between players and it showed because while Kobe’s fadeaway animation was much more pronounced, Gasol’s was much more subtle. The post game was really easy to get the hang of via the simplified control scheme. In the post, you will notice another little bit of subtle tweaking and that is in relation to what I would call aggression under the basket. For instance, when I hit Gasol running towards the basket or under the rim he usually just layed it in, but if I hit Andrew Bynum or Odom they usually dunked it, so the frequency of dunks to layups seems to mirror how the real players actually play. In the second quarter we will really got going and I had Kobe take a 15 foot jumper, he missed and then out of nowhere Ron Artest grabbed it out of the air for a seriously vicious, rimrocking putback and we were all like oh snap. To make that even better, we paused went to the replay screen and panned around to the Lakers bench and the reactions of the players mirrored the ones we had in real life with some of them jumping up and cheering and others putting their hands over the face as if to say “man that’s was nasty”. Everything that we had seen in the trailers thus far, we got a chance to see live an in person whether it was Kobe diving out of bands to save a loose ball or some of that Signature Play it was all there.
After getting finished with this hands-on session this has done nothing but make us wish that the 6th of October would just hurry up already. The game appears poised to maintain its throne as the king of the hardwood, but I guess we will just have to wait and see.
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