NBA Live 10 Demo Available, Post Impressions Here (360)

[Muzyk23]

you press Y

I have absolutely no problems with getting rebounds

just practice and remember timing matters

[baseballguy]

Quote: Originally Posted by Muzyk23

you press Y I have absolutely no problems with getting rebounds just practice and remember timing matters

I'm still a little confused because Y is the same button used to jump. Do you just press it while the ball is in the air, and once it comes off the rim, release and press again to grab the rebound?

[RayDog253]

You only box out if you have to. If there's no one near you, you wont do the box out animation and will just jump for the ball.

[phant030]

Quote: Originally Posted by Bornindamecca

Bumping the mid air collision foul has made the game a bit more realistic for me. Playing some beautiful basketball right now.

Yea, me too. Needed more fouls. Also, you have to punish the guards for letting players get in the paint. Getting bigs in foul trouble.

[Muzyk23]

Quote: Originally Posted by baseballguy

I'm still a little confused because Y is the same button used to jump. Do you just press it while the ball is in the air, and once it comes off the rim, release and press again to grab the rebound?

press it to box out and release it to jump for the rebound

[iLLosophy]

Quote: Originally Posted by Muzyk23

press it to box out and release it to jump for the rebound

I have to give the live guys props, they really studied their control schemes to provide intuitive controls. Once you get a lot of the controls down, it doesn't feel natural any other way...

[inkpimp007]

Quote: Originally Posted by jtdribbles25

Can you tell us more of what it is you want to happen on defense. It's very fundamentally sound. There's no reason to create an overly powerful defense, because it just doesn't exist. NOBODY can stop KOBE. period. Or Lebron or wade or any of the other great offensive players in the league. I agree with the swiping at the air comment. But what is it that you want to see happening on defense. Holding? More bumping? I have not had any problems with staying in front of my man. But Im only playing for the contest. No steals, not blocks. But anyway I just think the system here allows me to play defense the way it should be played and without the videogamey suctions and warping to make up for it.

I totally agree. For me I think what is so interesting is how you have to rethink how you play video game basketball now. Live 10 the more realistic you play the more rewarding. I can't stress enough how it's about knowing your individual players and how they move, when to call for help D, when to play off your man and when to crowd him. I think actually all the tools are there for us D wise it's just that you have to play a lot more realistic. Don't play for the steal or block right off (two things that plague virtual hoops) keep it simple and anticipate (goes back to know the players and what they like to do). This games has the fundamentals in spades ands down.

I do agree that the block momentum is a must, but i've been saying it for the last few years. I think with that aspect added it can create some really authentic moments. On offense it will allow us to be able to more affectively draw those shooting fouls. On D it gives us a wider range to be affective. It could also lead up to some very cool miss timed shot blocks and body collisions. I'm loving this game and I think it's going to take us a good while to get use to how it plays which is a good thing. We finally have sim basketball and i can't wait until Oct.6th

[loadleft]

Impressions from a "Live Fan boy"

I've played the demo in 5 different sessions throughout day one and here are my impressions:

The first for about 45 minutes:
I walked away disappointed. I am not sure what I expected but at the time this wasn't it! It seemed very superficial, meaning that it seemed like a lot of nice features thrown together but not in any way related. It seemed I had all these dribble moves in the hangar but could only pull off the basics "in game." Then I had Euro steps, pro-hops and all kinds of other specialty moves that I also could only do in the hangar. On defense no one seem to have any physical presence, meaning if seemed that I was trying to guard the offensive player but I was equipped with a body that was about the width of a pencil. The CPU player could get by me at will and challenging the shots seemed to matter just as much as if I had just turned and walked away.

The second session started just as I was ending the first one but my nephew walked in:
He wanted to try it so we played man vs. man. We first worked out in the hangar and he had all these glowing comments while I thought: "you just want to replicate your favorite And 1 Mixed Tape, you cheeser. (He and my brother-in-laws are why I stopped playing Live vs. humans about 10 years ago, it was 5 man NBA Jam.) We started to play man vs. man and surely enough he tried to play like he was in NY on the blacktop rather than an NBA court. Strange thing though was that I noticed he had to pay a price for that. He kept turning the ball over, and when he tried to force his way into the paint he got stripped. Then he tried to bomb threes with which he still had limited success. Mean-time I am running my typical drive and kick with a mix of drive and pull up and and move the ball to the open mid-range shooter offense (some name, I know, LOL) and I am being rewarded for that with quite a bit of success in terms of creating "sim looking" game play on offense. My limited defensive abilities though were allowing him 3 shots per possession and keeping the score close. It wasn't long before I noticed him taking mid-range jumpers out of his frustration and inability to consistently cheese, and I thought "hmm!" He eventually asked why don't we play 09 (what he didn't know I have many man hours of Live slider adjustments in 09 and his cheese wouldn't work there either). Session ended as we started playing Live. The results of that was his further frustration with missing contested lay-ups and dunks, while not being able to spam the 3. I am highly skilled with my long titled strategy in 09 so I destroyed him in 3 12 minute games with average score of 140 to 101! Before you think that's high on my side, it was due to his poor skill because using these sliders against the CPU averages me 105'ish to upper 90's in wins and the reverse in losses with the occasional blow out. I walked away thinking Live 10 is ideally suited for playing human competitors without even touching sliders (by the way all previous play was on All-star).

Third session came after nephew gave up and I took about an hour break:
I start off thinking this is only going to be a game good for human on human competition but as I play I start to notice the importance of space in all things (kinda like a basketball yoga mantra!) As I play and emphasize creating that space I start to notice that this game feels like a well tuned version of 09, I almost got on OS and posted that but you guys had posted about 30 pages of post I hadn't read and I wanted to read through them first so as to not just re-post something someone had already said. I chose to keep playing for a while and ended that session thinking that This is 09 with really good sliders and difficult to play defense. One thing to mention is I like the no suction part because I hated that part in 09. It made me feel as if the offense was controlling me on D and I had very little say.

Fourth Session started after I read through 30 some pages of post on OS, and I wanted to go back and investigate some of the others impressions. My day with Live started around 7am EST and by this point the Hall of Fame induction ceremony was on and John Stockton was speaking. My wife was going out for a bit and wanted to watch the ceremony when she returned after confirming there would be a replay on NBA TV, I went back to my XBOX:

I walked in knowing I had to create space so I started playing with that goal. This led me to start to see the difference in players abilities. Creating this space took different things depending on the player I controlled and who was guarding him. With Nelson I was able to achieve success by driving hard then stepping back and popping the mid range, VC and his athleticism was best used catching the ball while moving and taking one of his wild drifting mid to long range jumpers or using him as a mid range spot up shooter. Each player had something they were good at or not so much so, I just could not be effective off the bounce with Rashard but standing still with just a sliver of light and he's a sniper. I still couldn't work well in the paint and could only get all the way to the cup 1 out of 10 tries. I also learned in this session that on D, location relative to the ball and the basket is everything. After learning that I started to move on D more like I was sliding my feet by kinda using small taps on the LS to stay in position more than a smooth movement. I found this served me well because it was a fit of starts and stops (even though it looks continuous on the screen) and it often created contact with the offensive players by them running into me. It made my player feel as if he had a physical presence and was as wide as a man! I remember thinking that well this is difficult but realistic, when I play basketball in real life what button can I hold that makes me slide along with my check? Also I can't continuously move IRL while on D because I don't know where the offensive player is going until he starts moving in that direction and I react to that. I have to use a defensive shuffle IRL which basically is a fit of starts and stops. With this defensive tactic I started to notice that contesting the shots when I am in PROPER position is very effective. It was just really hard to stay in position when guarding quick players. I also noticed that the margin of error for proper defensive position was really slim. This session ended because my wife comes home and wants to watch the HOF ceremony so we watch the replay on NBA TV. I also start to read the rest of the post on OS. I noticed the post by Pared about defense and I again wanted to post here but didn't because I couldn't catch up to the end, by the time I get to the end of a page there would be a new one listed after I refreshed. I wanted to post that I found defense very effective when properly positioned but that proper positioning was very difficult. It turned out to be beneficial that I did read all that because I ran across Beluba's post about the defensive assist button and that it actually exist but that you don't want to use it in situations that players are changing directions laterally! Wow, I had assumed there was no defensive assist and you were on your own. I preferred this over suction but man was it hard! I couldn't wait for the HOF ceremony to end so I could try this out!

Session five:
Surely enough, there it was, Defensive Assist! Holding it down did not produce the kinda of results I liked, it took away my control on defense, but what it did do was get me in proper position to challenge the shot. I began to use the stick tap method to stay with the offensive player but tapped the assist button when he headed toward the basket or squared up to shoot, and man WOW! the game became a physical contest. I was able to bump the offensive player, cut off drives and force them to adjust their shots with regularity! Defense still wasn't a cake walk but boy it is/was great even in the post. It also significantly made shot blocking easier. I used it as a kind of modifier to shot block button. If I held the d-assist button just before tapping block I'd either block the shot when guarding smaller players or when using Dwight Howard or at least challenge the shot really well. I immediately saw CPU FG% go down. The great thing though is that this wasn't a magic slide button, I couldn't just hold it and move with the defender I had to manually play good D. One other thing I noticed, at least I think I did, is that you have to attack the shooting hand of the shooter, it wasn't enough to just stand in front of him and mash the block button but even when I was out of position I found I was able to have success by "blocking at" or jumping towards his actual shooting hand.

On offense I further discovered that you can't do things you (the modeled player) can't do in real life! I couldn't stand in front of Ron Artest and freestyle, Czar! I see guys complain about getting stripped in the paint but I found if there was an actual lane into or through the paint I could get through with ease but dribbling into a crowd always lost me the ball, I've grown too accustomed to just taking a good ball handler and being able to freestyle anywhere and everywhere despite the presence of the D. I saw that I could work in the post but you had to make your move quick because holding the ball in the post brought bad results. Another thing I saw was the importance of angle and shielding the ball. It wasn't about doing my favorite move but about doing some type of move that put the defender on the opposite side of my players body than the ball and basket.

Sorry for writing a novel, I just wanted to express my experience in detail with this demo because I see that a lot of people are turned off by it after spending what they feel is an adequate amount of time evaluating it. I wanted to convey that even I, a confessed Live fan boy and the guy who before playing the demo said the wife would have to sleep on the couch so Live 10 can sleep with me, didn't like the game for at least my first 4-5 hours of playing it. It turns out that liking Live 10, FOR ME, was an evolution process instead of the immediate WOW! I expected. With all that said I am now like WOW! this game is sooo deep, and so amazing. It's not the big stuff it's the little things. It's being beaten by the CPU and loving it because you got beat by good basketball not that the CPU can score at will in the presence of your good D or that your shots inexplicably stop going in. TO ME even the D is exciting because using my little taps I on the LS I am able to create contact and fight for position on the perimeter and do a pretty good job in the post.

I am loving it, so if you excuse me guys the wife is sleeping in late this morning I got to go roll her out of bed and onto the couch sp that she's used to it by the time Oct 6, gets here! LOL