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Tag Archives: 2K Sports

Review: NHL 2K9 (360)

2K Sports’ NHL 2K9 for the Xbox 360 is a rather ho-hum update to the annual professional hockey franchise. The game still lacks the cinematic flair experimented with in NHL 2K7 but went missing in action in last year’s NHL 2K8. While rosters have been updates, there are actually not that many noticeable tweaks between last year’s release and this edition of the game.

The hockey game, developed by Visual Concepts, does play host to some changes, however. Most notable is the new commentary team, made up of Randy Hahn, Drew Remenda, and John Shrader of the San Jose Sharks broadcast team. While this freshens up the commentary with new voices, they are too often stuck with the same too-brief script of tired clichés that the last commentary team used, limiting the appeal of the new voices behind the lines.

There are also some notable upgrades, including new stick handling moves, more superstar moves added to the list from 2K8, enhanced skating engine, enhanced checking, brand new fighting engine, hit by puck collisions, blocked shots, user-controlled Stanley Cup celebrations, playoff beards and more than 1,400 new gameplay animations. But it’s all just window dressing on a package that, in the end, is still more vanilla than it is rocky road.

The heartbeat of any pro hockey game is its franchise mode, and unfortunately, there have been some troubles with NHL 2K9 in that regard; it seems that some users have discovered that if they play through more than a couple months of the franchise mode in one sitting, the game has a tendency to freeze up and result in lost data.

Also, if one manually saves their franchise immediately after a game-controlled auto-save, some users have reported that their save file gets self-deleted by the game. Although these problems are said to be limited and rare in scope by 2K Sports, they can occur and certainly become a problem for those who experience them. So far, in my testing, I have not been able to duplicate these errors.

The skating physics are improved from last year’s model, and the feel of the game is solid. Once you learn the controls, it is possible to be competitive in most of the games you play, though the AI is smart enough to win some from you even if you’re a series veteran, especially on the higher difficulty settings where the game physics and AI amp up and start playing as smart as you, and allowing fewer flukey goals.

Still, there’s really not much new in the way of expanding the appeal and features found in franchise mode, and the online play options are pretty much the same as before. When you combine this relative lack of real change or improvement to the series, along with the annoying lack of the cinematic presentation flair on display in 2K7 but since abandoned, there’s not much to really recommend this year’s model. If you desire up-to-date rosters, this is a serviceable entry in the series, but those who loved the 2K7 version won’t find a suitable replacement in this year’s model.

Review: College Hoops 2K8 (PS3)

In basketball and in videogames, one thing remains true: the struggle to reach the top is nothing compared to the struggle to stay on top once you’ve reached that plateau. No one should understand this better than 2K Sports and the development team behind College Hoops 2K8.

Back when they were first relaunching their college hoops title, the king of the hill for college basketball games was EA Sports’ March Madness series. It took several years and a lot of critic’s picks hype, but College Hoops has clearly grown to become the college basketball game of record across most console platforms.

They’ve been on top, depending on who you talk to, for a couple-three seasons now, and the real challenge for them has become staying on the cutting edge and innovating enough that March Madness or some other title doesn’t come ‘round and overtake them again.

This year, 2K Sports put more time into revitalizing and refreshing the Legacy mode, which has been stagnant for the past couple outings as the developer focused on graphics improvements to bring the franchise into the next-gen era. That mostly accomplished, Legacy mode was overdue for a makeover and this year’s edition has received some much-needed attention.

Consider this, from a game play perspective, to be College Hoops’ real next-gen coming out party, and you can get the invites to the debutant bash from the same place you receive the first communion invitations. If you thought building a winning franchise was tough before, prepare for the next generation of legacy-building.

In the game, Legacy mode is still offered in two flavors. Open flavor will appeal to folks who just want to coach their favorite college team and nothing else; it allows you to take over any program you desire, often with the real-life coaches currently at those schools. Yes, that means Tubby Smith is now at Minnesota, rather than Kentucky, sports fans!

The other flavor of Legacy mode is Career, in which you start out as a young, inexperienced, less-skilled coach and your only option is to take on a bottom-rung school at an obscure conference where only by winning the conference tournament are you guaranteed a spot in the NCAA March Madness event, because your conference is so small that no other team, no matter their win-loss record, is going to get respect from the NCAA Selection Committee. As one remakes the fortunes of these obscure programs, other schools start taking notice.

After a minimum two-year stint at each stop along the way, you get a chance at the end of the season to take part in the coaching carousel. The better your teams finish each year, the more likely you’ll be invited to take over the program at a school in a more high-profile conference. Of course, it’s not always best to move up fast, since an optional game feature allows your coach to be fired for poor team performance, so if you move into a Big 10 or ACC job too soon, you might not be ready for the challenge and could get busted back down to the obscure ranks once again. Some folks may prefer to stay for a longer stretch at a smaller program where winning the NCAA March Madness tournament isn’t a yearly expectation, but perhaps only making the tournament is.

As always, scouting and recruiting are at the heart of this game, and that is where a large part of the redesign effort has been focused. Puffing out recruiting and scouting is a new mode, the ABL season. A real-life summer league made up of high school all-stars, in the game there are more than 100 ABL teams spread out across the nation and as a coach you can either sim past all this, attend the games, or even play them out.

The advantage to playing them out is that you earn extra points for recruiting functions once recruiting season starts, so there’s a real advantage to at least playing out some of these games, especially if you’re coach of a small school with a thin scouting budget to begin with.

Throughout the ABL season, you can choose to attend or play out as many or as few games as you wish, and target players. Based on your coaching skills after playing out each game, you’ll start to see some of the ratings for those players revealed; skilled coaches will see all the ratings revealed in fewer games; less skilled coaches will need more games to make those assessments.

About the only disappointment here is that once those skills are revealed, those are that player’s real, hard-coded stats. Unlike Wolverine Sports’ Draft Day Sports: College Basketball for PC, the stats are accurate, rather than skewed to the coach’s perspective. Seeing less-experienced coaches by a little off on their skills assessment of players, as in DDS:CB, would add a bit more realism to College Hoops 2K8.

There are many ways to utilize the ABL season, but for smaller school coaches especially, it’s usually best to focus on the ABL teams that are closer to their college; after all, how often is a player from Los Angeles going to take seriously a scholarship offer from Maine, if he’s drawing interest from UCLA, Kentucky and Duke? Not often.

Still, with this simple but depth-adding feature, 2K Sports has innovated in the area of college recruiting in a college basketball game, in a way that no other game has anticipated or pioneered before them. That’s how a top game in its category, like College Hoops 2K8, manages to stay on top.

On the PlayStation 3, the graphics are sharp as ever, though it’s clear that the team focused on game play this year, rather than graphics improvements. That works fine, though, since game play improvements were clearly the bigger area of need. This may be the last edition of the game in which the SixAxis controller is utilized exclusively, since Sony plans to launch the DualShock 3, with both rumble and six-axis motion sensitivity, early in 2008. That alone, if fully utilized in College Hoops 2K9, could make next year’s edition even better for controls. The utilization of motion-sensitivity remains scant and optional this season, just as it was last season.

The online mode is robust and friendly, making it easy to find game opponents, even though Sony’s network is still not as robust with traffic as Xbox Live; the delay of Sony’s Home interface may have something to do with that.

In the end, the improvements made to the Legacy mode transform that part of the game into an area of renewed interest, which is good since the Legacy mode is the heart of any offline play experience with the game. The result is that College Hoops 2K8 remains ahead of the injured and “headed for IR” March Madness franchise by a good distance, for now.

Review: NBA 2K8 (360)

One thing that’s great about NBA 2K8 on the Xbox 360 is that it’s always easy to find an online opponent. After playtesting for review Sony’s NBA 08 on PS3 and finding the online lobbies almost always vacant, it was a relief to get into what is arguably the best NBA videogame on the market for several years running, 2K Sports’ NBA 2K8.

Sure, EA Sports partisans will argue in favor of NBA Live 08, but EA has treated its pro and college basketball games like some pig farmer’s boot heel for some time now. I mean, the company still hasn’t implemented something as simple as linking the college and pro games via draft files last I checked; how simple is that? As simple as installing car spoilers, really; simpler, even!

Pretty simple for NBA 2K8, for which something that basic is a given, so that their energy goes into more critical improvements. This year, team chemistry is a theme, and considering some of the team chemistry blowups we’ve witnessed in the real NBA, like Marbury and the Knicks, Bryant and the Lakers, and before the season started, Garnett and the Wolves, it’s a wonder that this element was given short shrift for so long.

Keeping all the player egos in check is a key to success in the single-player franchise mode; if players start becoming discontent, you can see the results more noticeably on the court this season. That’s nice because although a lack of production may frustrate some gamers who want arcade-style thrills, those seeking more realistic performances and results will not be disappointed.

Back this season is my main man, Kevin Harlan, heading up the announce duties; this man IS the voice of the NBA for me, since he cut his teeth calling Wolves games on KFAN AM 1500 in Minneapolis, back in the pre-Kevin Garnett days. 2K Sports is wise to keep him on for another season.

On the court, the physics are solid and even the online play via Xbox Live seems a bit smoother this year. I’ve run into a lot more “good sportsmanship” types this season than last year and, thankfully, a lot fewer “quit if they start losing” types. The graphics are a marginal upgrade at best, though, since the developers seem to have put more energy into other aspects of the game, such as refining the franchise mode, working on new online play features, and getting animations smoother, rather than a general detail-level upgrade graphically.

While the game is always fun to play, in all candor there’s not a revolution going on with this game, this time out. The game is a solid upgrade over last year’s version, but doesn’t introduce anything world-changing. If that’s enough for you as an NBA fan, NBA 2K8 is still the cream of the pro hoops crop this season on any gaming console. (And no, I’m not counting text-sims on PC like Wolverine Sports’ Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball, which is in an entirely separate category.)