After spending eight hours playing NBA Live 14, the best thing I can say about my initial experience is that it's mercifully over.

Professional obligation is all that kept me from turning off NBA Live 14 after experiencing EA Sports' buggy, sub-standard rendition of professional basketball.
 

Passing: Despite offering three different control methods for passing, simply moving the ball from player to player is a huge hassle in NBA Live 14. Lengthy throwing and receiving animations make passing a slow and sloppy experience.

Directional aiming often sends to ball to the wrong teammate, with no real difference in accuracy between the left joystick and the right joystick. The additional finger gymnastics of holding down R1 while aiming the right joystick make that method even more impractical.

X button and O button passes take far too long to "charge up" to full power, with the ball coming out slow and floaty even at a full charge.

Icon passing is more accurate and fairly useful when coming out of the backcourt, but it's still far too cumbersome to use during half-court offense, where passing lanes open and close quicker than your fingers can react.

Off-Ball AI: Don't believe the hype behind NBA Live 14's "Synergy DNA." Most of your AI teammates remain stationary on offense unless they're specifically told to move via one of the game's unwieldy d-pad commands.

CPU teams are equally simple-minded, spending most offensive possessions with a star player in isolation while his teammates look on idly.

Broken Overhead Cameras: NBA Live 14 offers two preset, non-customizable cameras for gamers who prefer to play from a top-down, overhead perspective. Both the "Baseline High" and "Baseline Low" cameras stutter constantly, fluctuating between 15-30 frames per second, depending on the arena and the current crowd state. Gamers wanting to play NBA Live 14 at a steady 60 frames per second have no choice but to use one of the side-to-side broadcast cameras.

Buggy Live Moments: The Live Moments feature lets gamers replay top performances from recently completed NBA games. In about half of the challenges I tried, an audio glitch completely muted the crowd noise for the opening minutes of each challenge. The crowd noise would then suddenly return to normal after a few minutes of play. Another, more severe glitch occurred once, where everyone on screen froze as soon as the challenge finished loading. The game then crashed back to the dashboard, giving an error code "CE-34878-0."

Online Latency Issues: Of my five online sessions, four were completely unplayable due to latency. Online games literally look like they're moving in slow-motion, with inputs registering on screen several seconds after a button is pressed. Playing basketball, a sport reliant on timing and technique, is impossible when the lag is this bad. Not even NBA 2K1 ran this poorly on the Sega Dreamcast, and it was communicating with 56K dial-up modems.
 

ESPN Presentation: Studio reporter Jalen Rose sets the stage for each game before handing the mic to commentators Jeff Van Gundy and Mike Breen. Van Gundy's blunt, no-nonsense delivery has been captured well, but after only a few hours of game time, it's discouraging to already recognize many repeated lines from Van Gundy and Breen.

NBA Live Mixtape: Of the 30-plus songs already included in NBA Live 14, at least half of them will have your head bumping. The few annoying tracks can be individually switched off. Live's soundtrack should continue to improve over time as more tracks are added throughout the year.

Menus: The different modes and game features are all easy to find thanks to a smart layout and elegant menu design.

It says a lot about the quality of NBA Live 14 that I had such a difficult time just coming up with three "Makes," whereas I easily could have detailed five more "Misses."

After only a few hours of play, it's already evident that NBA Live 14 is not the type of title gamers should rush out and spend $60 on. Keep checking Operation Sports for a full review of NBA Live 14 later this week.