NBA Live 09 All-Play

The unliving, says Rob

Remember when the Wii controller was first unveiled? I think most people felt a mixture of excitement and trepidation. The optimist in all of us hoped that gesture-based controls would offer unprecedented immersion in games, and take us a step closer to the sort of 'Virtual Reality' that videogame players have dreamt of since the early 90s. But the pessimist wondered how accurately the remote's accelerometers would detect subtler movements, and feared that Nintendo's great white hope would simply produce scores of games that replaced mindless button-mashing with aimless wand-waving.

NBA Live 09 All-Play falls firmly into the second category. The controls are flimsy and unreliable, and will only give ammunition to those eager to point out the limitations of the Wii. This is one of too many third-party Wii games that make the remote feel like a step backwards from conventional controls, where the developers have felt constrained instead of liberated by accommodating its inclusion.

Things are at their worst when you're not in possession of the ball, where the most effective tactic seems to be desperately chasing after the opposition while frantically waving the remote from side-to-side in the hope of performing a 'steal'. As your opponent gets closer to the basket, you'll change to mindlessly waving the remote up and down instead of side to side, as this occasionally allows you to block a shot or catch a rebound. But as is too often the case in Wii games that have replaced a button press with a shake of the remote, there's no subtlety or skill to the timing. You're simply charging your men around the court, shaking your remote constantly and hoping for the best.

Things don't get much better when you're in possession. Players drift about the court effortlessly, able to change direction in an instant. You could be forgiven for thinking that that sounds like a good thing, but it's truly not. The giants of a basketball court should feel weighty and solid, with some sense of momentum, but here they glide around the court like ice-skaters.

Passing the ball is slightly more satisfying, as you can point where you want your pass to go, and time it with a degree of precision by pressing the 'A' button. The speed with which the game moves from one end of the court to the other encourages you to rush your passes, and while this inevitably leads to frustrating errors, it is at least one way in which NBA All Play reflects the real life game.

Yet this glimmer of hope is totally undermined by the fact that your team-mates' off-the-ball movement is either non-existent, or at best totally predictable. The kind of satisfying pass that feels like threading the eye of a needle just can't happen, because your team mates seem all too happy to run into a marked position and just stand about waving their arms hopelessly.

Even the simple mechanic of throwing the ball towards the hoop is frustrating and unreliable. When you're ready to shoot, you flick upwards with the remote to make your player jump, and then flick down to release the ball. But again you'll find the remote won't read your intentions with sufficient accuracy, and so releasing the ball at the apex of your jump to score a beautiful three-pointer becomes a matter of luck rather than timing.

As a token respite, there are a few "play them once and then try to forget them" mini-games thrown into the mix, as is customary for all EA's sports titles on the Wii. Although it's possible that the slam dunk challenges might provide some short-lived multiplayer thrills, with the ridiculous number of superior mini-game compilations available on the Wii, it would be hard to herald any of these as a meaningful consolation for the main game.

Fundamentally, an enjoyable sports title relies on at least one of two things: giving the player tight control of the action, and (not unrelatedly) making matches lively and immersive. Occasionally, a sports game can be fun to play despite loose controls, by generating an electrifying sense of atmosphere; but even here NBA Live falls short of the standards set by ancient basketball games like NBA Jam on the SNES. The little incidental touches, like the squeaking of trainers when a player switches direction, or the grunt they make as they jump for a slam-dunk, or the commentator shouting "FROM DOWN TOWN!" when attempting a long shot, are absolutely necessary for recreating the excitement of real life basketball. NBA Live feels hollow and soulless without these things, as even its excitable commentators are too unresponsive to add any much-needed energy to proceedings.

If you hope to get any satisfaction at all out of NBA Live, your only real option is to give up on the motion controls, and hold the remote sideways. Removing your reliance on the game's poor motion detection and using button presses instead removes a significant number of its all too many problems. Yet when you find yourself playing an ugly and unsatisfying basketball game, using the same controls as Nintendo's first ever console, on a machine that announced itself to the world as a 'Revolution', you can only ever feel short changed. Compared to the great strides forward made by most of EA's other sports titles this year, NBA Live is an embarrassment.

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By Rob Foster