The game starts off with a high level of presentation that bleeds into every pore of the game’s surface. The much touted hotspot feature is hardly anything to shout home about either, it’s essentially a way of showing you where each player is most likely to make a shot, while useful it’s hardly worth all the hype laced on the back of the box. However outside of actual game time you are overwhelmed by menus and it’s quite jarring to say the least. Live 08 gives off mixed signals when playing, it runs quite smoothly with hardly any noticeable framerate dips, and the controls and decent animations keep matches running relatively fluid giving the actual play time more of a casual feel. After last year’s poorly received and imaginatively titled NBA Live 07 (Metacritic score 59) EA Canada have come out swinging with a vastly improved iteration of the series that may be able to reclaim those lost fans who migrated to Live’s rival NBA2K. NBA Live for the misinformed is EA’s long standing basketball series the latest edition (NBA Live 08 for those misanthropes emerging from underneath their rocks to feed) has a difficult task ahead of it.
