NBA 2K9 Demo Available, Post Impressions Here

[23bluesman]

Here are my impressions after a combined 2.5-3 hours of play (PS3):

First up, the graphics - I was quite surprised to see how bland it looked. The textures of the crowd, ref, and players (skin) are great, but the court logos and the jerseys seemed kinda blurred. All in all, very underwhelming. But hey, I'm playing on a flat-screen component cable standard 480i resolution, so I guess I don't have the right to complain, lol! I increased the contrast settings of my tv, played around with color and brightness, lowered the sharpness, and pretty much got a nice looking game. I do love the player close-ups, especially KG! Looks so real!

Presentation is severely lacking in the demo, but we've all seen the numerous vids on this site, and pretty much agree that 2k gets an A+ on that.

Alright, moving on to offense - It took me awhile to get used to the isomotion controls, but when I did it felt good. Not great, but good. I'll be honest, I still prefer Live's freestyle/quickstrike control scheme, but isomotion does it's job pretty well too. I love driving strong to the basket by simply holding the turbo button, nudging your defender along the way, and blowing by him. I also love that holding down the turbo button has a risk/reward/lucky factor, in that sometimes you get called for a charge, sometimes you blow by your man with the nudging animation, and sometimes you draw a blocking foul.

I love the post game as well, with the plethora of moves that you can do. The shots under and around the basket are pretty nice too, very realistic looking - simple off-the-board lay-ins, and soft lay-ins right into the rim, with some small fading shots thrown in for good measure.

Adaptive AI is good, as your teammates do get open, set screens, cut to the basket and such. Sometimes though, it's pretty easy to score that way. Just watch your teammates, and when there is a cutter going to the basket pass him the ball, easy score. Bumping up the difficulty and adjusting sliders could hopefully remedy this.

I was disappointed that I couldn't play calls in the demo. While the Adaptive AI is good, I'm more of a "let me call my own plays" guy. I want to know the exact sets that I will run, where each of my players are during each phase of the play, etc. I'll have to wait until the final version for that.

I think 2k needs to add more passing animations. I liked Live's passing animations more.

I do love 2k's free throw routines, you can tell they really put a lot of effort in those. I'm a huge Laker fan, and I'm glad to see they got Kobe, Gasol, and Odom's free throw routine perfectly (Kobe wiping his palms on his chest and leaving his hand in the air, Gasol with the low dribbles, and Odom with the step back of the right foot before he shoots..wow). Btw, Kobe is GOD in this game!

Mid-air collisions, bodies falling to the floor, and post-play animations are sick! 'Nuff said.

Alright, moving on to defense - Again, this is where I prefer Live's Lockdown-D more. It just feels like a chore holding the L2 button and clicking on the right stick up down left right, when in reality you just have to move your feet closer/farther away from the ones you're defending, and shading his left/right (in short, everything should be controlled by the left stick, like in Live). When I play my man tight sometimes I get the 'bodied up' animation, sometimes I don't. The shading, I don't even know if it really works. Hopefully there's a slider to increase contact animations to really cut-off those slashing guards. I read somewhere in this thread that shading works well when defending the post. I'll experiment more on the lock-on/lockdown feature later.

That being said, I also believe that I need more practice time (and perhaps a tutorial) to really measure how good this system is. Because I believe that the concept is good, it's just lacking in the execution. Or perhaps I'm just clueless at how to use it, lol.

Which leads me to this question: is there a difference between using lock-on/lockdown to defend (holding L2), and just physically being in the spot without holding L2? What I mean is, if I choose to play my man tight and shade his right side using lock-on (holding L2), is there a difference between that and me just moving my man closer and to the right of my defender with the left stick, without holding L2? Lol, sorry if it's confusing.

I love the blocks in this game! Blocking jumpshots, blocking post-up moves, blocking dunks, and especially blocking lay-up attempts are so freaking fun and well-implemented, while still being very realistic.

Can't really comment yet on the steals, as I suck with stealing, lol.

Other things to note - crowd is fantastic, but the sound is sub-par, especially compared to Live's demo.

I guess I'll stop here. All in all, I like the demo. I'm not blown away by it, but I am enjoying it. Take my impressions with a grain of salt, because first of all, they are just my opinions. Second, it's based on a demo that I believe is quickly put together and perhaps older build, with bugs and missing features (some say that the isomotion is limited in this demo). Also, I didn't really play 2k8 extensively, as I just bought my PS3 last month.

[tamakin]

360 demo is out now!!! Downloading now!

[DakkoN]

Ok guys, that's enough telling us that the demo is up and that you're downloading. Stick to the impressions.

[antigravity]

After all that, I can't download the damn thing because my gold membership has expired... can't believe it.

[thereginator28]

Quote: Originally Posted by antigravity

After all that, I can't download the damn thing because my gold membership has expired... can't believe it.

Assuming that you haven't made 3 accounts on your 360, if you make a LIVE account it'll give you a free 1 month gold trial, but only for the first 3 accounts you make on your 360.

[antigravity]

Quote: Originally Posted by thereginator28

Assuming that you haven't made 3 accounts on your 360, if you make a LIVE account it'll give you a free 1 month gold trial, but only for the first 3 accounts you make on your 360.

Thank you mate... You're a life saver!!!

I had one profile left hehe

Downloading it now. Thanks champ

[XCalmLikeABombX]

Played a few quarters, and the first thing I want to say is I see no jaggies at all. Some of the character models are spot on, and some look odd. There seems to be great crowd interaction, but I didn't feel alot of atmosphere. I think the crowd noise wasn't nearly loud enough. The gameplay was smooth, and it was pretty easy to catch on to taking shots, and I had a few steals using the stick. Based on the demo I would give it a 8/10.

[ExtremeGamer]

Playing them both, the nod is a slight, very slight edge to the 360 version, the brightness of the game just makes it look a little more life like.

If you put both of them in front of me without saying which was which though, no way I could tell. This was only after going back and forth.