On a great note,
NBA Live 09 does offer up a lot in terms of gameplay modes and other new features. Sure, you can still mix it up in either a single game or within a Dynasty, but you can now take your favorite team into the new Online Leagues. Here, you can allow up to 30 players per league, playing as many as eleven games. It would be much more of a feature had the leagues been more like an online multi-player season or dynasty, but at least it's a start.
The biggest new feature in NBA Live 09 is that the game now contains DNA365. Yes, you heard me. This is EA's new way to track stats, and they are updated daily (for one year's time) for your basketball pleasure. You can now play your games based on the real-life players' hot or cold streaks, and even have the ability to play the previous night's game using their stats to help recreate the game. It's a cool feature, but other than constant updates, the rest of it still hasn't sold me to the fullest.
NBA Live 09, like its fellow EA Sports titles for the 2009 generation, contains a Be A Pro gameplay mode. This is a cool feature that allows you to take control of your favorite player and use him throughout the game. I have loved this feature in other titles, but I'm actually fairly disappointed with its use in NBA Live 09. In NHL 09, for example, committing a penalty had you looking through your player's eyes from the penalty box, actually penalizing you for your mistakes, and Madden 09 only had you play the downs that were actually on the field. Both titles allowed you to create a player as well, and whether you created a player or chose a current star, you were in control of that athlete for the remainder of the season. These features are strangely missing from NBA Live 09 though. First off, you cannot create a player for the Be A Pro feature, nor do you control your player - and only your player - throughout the season. Instead, you will choose a position to play, essentially, because while your chosen player rides the pine, you will be in control of his replacement. In addition, you have the ability to choose a different player each game, so it's harder to feel as connected with your player as it happens to be in those other sports titles.
The upside to this Be A Pro feature is that online, it has a spin-off. Here you can play team games and essentially create your own basketball clans, playing up to 10 players on the same court, controlling a single player. Strangely, I do find this to almost be more enjoyable than the normal modes of play that allow you to control the ball-handler at all times. The level of strategy and patience involved helps to pick up an otherwise drab game.
Finally, let's talk about actual gameplay. NBA Live 09 has got some very fluid player animations that look great, but there is a high cost to this, sacrificing gameplay tremendously. When you think you are about to perform one action, the computer will often decide something else for your player to do instead, and more often than not, those animations are set in stone and can't be broken out of. As one example, trying to run back and cover my man on defense had me instantly stop and double-team the dribble, even while I continuously pressed away from the ball handler, trying to get back on defense. Blocking shots has also become a nuisance as well, because the animations associated with them are so #?@% long that it is almost impossible develop a well-timed blocked shot. In a similar manner, rebounding has become extremely challenging because your player will jump out of position sometimes.
I also have to mention that my game disc had both temporary and fatal freeze-ups that seem to be happening on both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 (do a search online). Passing is also sometimes not spot-on the way it should be. Usually, pressing the direction of the pass with the Left Analog Stick will pass in that direction, but sometimes it will choose to either launch the ball down to a covered player off-screen (thereby throwing the ball away) instead of the guy right in front of you, or it will even pass to a player in a different direction, relative to the way that you pressed the controller. Another frustrating thing about NBA Live 09 is that because the (default) camera is quite far away from the action, it is very difficult to know who's who on the court. Sure, the game shows player names underneath their feet, but did I mention that I CAN'T READ THEM ON AN SDTV?!
