Customer Reviews

NBA 2K10

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Well I waited awhile to review this game until I got a real feel for it.
I must say it took me about a week to really appreciate the subtle changes that 2k10 has made.

1) The oops off the glass to a team mate or to yourself is a plus... and the Put back Slams are nuts.

2) The ratings of team are no longer high so there is no 1 dominant team, every team can be a threat.

3) Smoother Online play.

4) Improved defense... and the stamina meter makes is so people can't run around all day with KOBE, LEBRON and D WADE all game like in 2k9.

5) Smarter AI this year it actually feels like you're playing a real person... The computer ain't dumb no more they'll make the extra pass to the open man or make you pay for a blown defensive cover.

6) My player mode gives the game more playability no longer just a season or online game and it actually improves your basketball IQ for playing in Crews mode or Team Matches.

7) Being able to use your created player online is also a plus .

8) The dribbling is crazy you can literally break defenders down, make them slip trip and everything else and it looks real not all arcadish.

Cons:
1) GLITCHES... you got a fast break going in for the stuff and your dude takes the slowest 2 steps to the basket in the world... Not all the time but it takes away from the smoothness of the game.

2) There are other delays here in there sometime the Ref and the Person taking the ball out tend to play Catch back in forth for like 30 of 40 seconds.. whats that all about. And there are a few other things that can affect game play here and there.


All in all I like this game it just feels more real to me than other B-Ball games. In my opinion it provides for the most realistic NBA experience. The game play is spot on. All though there are Glitches they are not a deal breaker plus 2K is releasing a PATCH for it soon so this game will be the Premiere game it is always been.

It feels like basketball is the red headed stepchild sport to video game makers. 2k10 continues the disappointment. The graphics are improved, as they are every year (although the players do have a weird chunky look to their bodies sometimes, but no biggie), but the fun of playing hasn't changed much. Scoring is a little broken toward the inside and the defense is still no good. There's just no realness or enjoyment to running your defensive looks.

My biggest complaint is that the game doesn't have great responsiveness with the controls. Everything works alright (the dunking is not really all that an amazing feature), but when you press buttons on the controller it's like you're making plans for the future. You hit the button to juke out with your player, run to the board, time the layout just right, except by the time you're done your player on the screen has just started to make his juke move. T-T-T-Today Junior! It makes the game feel awkward and I wish 2k sports would have it worked out by now.

If you need to play Xbox basketball there aren't many options. Maybe that's why this game is so uncompetitive.

I've been playing the 2k series for years, and while 8 wasn't a giant leap forward, and 9 had some issues, nba 2k10 is just a bad video game. It's created more problems without solving old ones. A few nice features like association mode or the gimmicky myplayer mode don't fix this game's glaring problems. First, online play is terrible- if you need confirmation, just check out any number of other reviews. It was released broken and hasn't been fixed. Second, the AI is still awful. The four guys you are not controlling regularly blow assignments, don't challenge shots, never play passing lanes or go for the ball: some of this can be fixed with sliders but the default settings are flat out broken. The controls are also awful: players you control act on a delay (that increases in online play) so that often you make an open pass to a guy running towards the basket and he will patiently wait for the opposing player to catch up before making a move. Defense is unintuitive and needs to be re-built, period. It's actually gotten worse than it was 2 years ago. The most inexcusable thing is the lag- even in offline modes lag creeps in, taking an already frustrating game and making it ten times worse. 2K needs to stop focusing on slightly improved graphics and re-recording audio and actually fix what's wrong with this series. Right now it's a basketball simulator that doesn't accurately simulate basketball AND isn't fun to play.

For a long time I was a devout NBA Live player. A few years ago the franchise went stale and little was changed or improved upon from year to year. That was when I switched over to the 2K franchise. Every year I found myself getting excited for October because that's when the much anticipated new version of the 2K series is. It pains me to say it, but it appears that 2K has fallen into the same slump that Live was in a few years ago. Other than minor improvements on a few mundane details, this is the same game as 2K9.

THE GOOD:

- The new NBA Today feature that gives a breakdown of each day's real NBA games and their results.

- The graphics are better than last year, but the difference isn't as profound and jaw dropping as in years past. Nonetheless, players do look more realistic.

- The commentary by Marv Albert and Clark Kellogg is the best of any sports game I've played. While a lot of it is recycled from past years' versions, there is a surprising amount of new stuff (if you're familiar with the NCAA Football franchise from EA Sports then you know how annoying it can be to have the same commentary every year, especially when it doesn't add anything to the gaming experience). The banter between Albert and Kellogg is very believable and it doesn't sound like they are acting.

- 2K has done a total overhaul on the in game menus. This is going to be a matter of personal taste, but I like the way these look.

- By far the best change is the addition of the "My Player" mode. It allows you to create a player of any position who has a specific set of strengths and weaknesses. Here is the general synopsis:

You start out playing in a summer league and try to make it to an NBA training camp. If you get an invite to training camp then you try to avoid getting cut. If you do you head to the D-League, if not then you play in the NBA. Along the way you earn skill points used to improve any aspect of your game - from mental toughness to scoring from the post.

In each game you are assessed a "Teammate grade" for what you do on the court. Taking good shots, setting good picks, rebounds, assists, getting good position on your defender, running a fast break correctly and a number of other things will raise your teammate grade. Turnovers, excessively calling for a pass, letting your match up (the man you guard) score, taking bad shots and not staying with your match up will lower your teammate grade. Before each game you are given three challenges to complete during the game. For each one you complete successfully you get additional skill points. For example, you might be asked to hold your match up to 51% shooting from the field, make 4 baskets in the paint, and finish with a teammate grade of B+.

The My Player mode is a lot of fun if you can get past the idea of only being one player on a team. You have to work to get open and its not a good idea to shoot the ball every time you touch it. If you stick with it then you will enjoy this game mode. It is a good addition to this franchise, but it certainly isn't enough to carry the game. Which brings me to...

THE BAD:

- The online play, or should I say the lack thereof. A quick history lesson: 2K8 had a great online feature complete with leagues, quick games against any random person who was online and ready to play, and game lounges for all different skill levels. After such a great and expansive online option the previous year, 2K9, for some inexplicable reason, did not have game lounges. This meant who you played - and how good he or she was - was totally random. A beginner playing an expert meant the beginner left feeling frustrated and discouraged and the expert got to pad their stats. Not to mention connecting to an online game was unacceptably difficult. In my experience, over 3 out of every 4 attempted online games wouldn't be able to connect in the first place. It was very frustrating.

Well, that was nothing compared to the problems 2K10 has. The main reason I play sports games is to play online. I have owned this game for over a week and I still have not been able to connect to an online game. I have tried every day and every single time it reports a connection error and refers me to a website that offers no help and a FAQ that is blank. I have heard a rumor that 2K is planning on releasing a patch to fix the online problems but I am not holding out much hope; they did the same thing last year and it didn't help.

- The gameplay is almost the exact same as last year. The look is a bit different, but the first time I played it I dominated my opponent because it is essentially the same game I've been playing since October of last year.

- It is unbelievably easy to score inside. Playing as the Hornets, I was able to have Chris Paul post up Kevin Garnett on several occasions and only get blocked once. I had Mike Bibby dunk on Tim Duncan. My jaw dropped as the laws of physics were suspended when Allen Iverson went for a layup and the ball traveled through - that's right...THROUGH - the arm of Shaq as he made a futile attempt to swat the layup into the next zip code.

- In the game manual it claims that you can control the different dunks the players do. It could be user error, but I haven't been able to make it work. I have talked to others who have complained about this too.

- The shot stick is counter-intuitive and largely unnecessary. It has been a feature in the 2K series for a while now and I know they are trying to answer NBA Live's manual dribble moves but not all of the shots work and the one's that do are confusing and take practice to get down. When you're in the middle of a game and you are driving to the basket, you don't want to think about which direction to point the shot stick. It would be better to hold the shoot button and then use the movement stick to control how the player releases the shot. To me that seems like the more natural way to play.

IN CONCLUSION

2K has a great tradition of producing top of the line basketball games. While this newest version certainly isn't a bad game, the game makers left way too much room for improvement. It is a disappointment mainly because I expect better from this franchise, especially considering this is its 10 year anniversary. Instead of taking time to innovate the gameplay itself, the makers of 2k10 spent most of their time and energy on aesthetic details like the menus and commentary. With the exception of the My Player mode, this game is no more than a brightly decorated version of 2k9.

This has got to be the worse nba2k game for online play. the servers are always down. league play is a joke(does not work). 2k10 has the worse glitches( freezing, passing out of bounds game stops in animation etc.) of any nba2k game. avoid this game, hopefully they come out with a better game next year.If you can buy this game for 20 bucks, that about what this game is worth. DO NOT PAY FULL PRICE FOR THE GAME!! You will be disappointed.

Disclosure: I only play franchise mode, not online.

Once again the video game review sites have managed to convince me to buy the 2k series over the NBA Live series, and once again I'm baffled: what game were they playing? Because the reviews all manage to gloss over the sluggish, awkward, counter-intuitive gameplay. The reviewers love to focus on the graphics, the modes, the online play, yadayadayada. Oh sure, you'll hear plenty about how the gameplay and AI can be glitchy, but in the end they always give the gameplay overall a B+ range score.

I utterly disagree. Look, a basketball game is hard to make, because it's impossible to let you control a player realistically with just an XBox controller. Football is more mechanical and strategic, and the players are more interchangeable, so it works a bit better, but basketball depends so much on subtle, quick movements that are hard to reproduce and harder to control with buttons and joysticks. So there's a lot of work that the CPU is going to have to do for you. However, the problem with 2K10 is that it automates almost everything and ignores your instructions and intentions too often. Players take horrible contested shots that you thought would be wide open. They stop and shoot a jumper instead of continuing to the hoop. Back-to-the-basket play is uncontrollable. Layups can be harder to hit than three-pointers. The rare wide open shot is still a 50-50 proposition. Even the simplest of inputs -- pushing the left joystick in the direction you want your player to move -- is often overridden by one player animation sequence or another: he can't go that way, he's still doing something else you told him to do three seconds ago!

I still haven't figured out how to do a crossover or other ball-handling moves other than by accident. Several years ago (maybe still, since I haven't played NBA Live for a while) the NBA Live games dedicated the right joystick for ball-handling, which was great -- move it left or right for a crossover, down for a step back, in a circle for a spin move, etc., and man was that effective and intuitive! It was so easy to string moves together. In 2K10 it's a crapshoot. NBA Live also had one button for dunk/layup and one for jumper, which also clarified things so much more. Most awesomely, it had an alley-oop button that doubled as a "pass to the guy closest to the basket" button, which was utter genius, especially on the fast-break. Also, when you brought up the pass icons, they stayed up until you made the pass or cancelled them. In 2K10 they disappear after a few seconds, which ends up messing up my plays or causing turnovers at least 3-4 times in a game (try to pass to the X player, the icon disappears just at that instant, and the pass becomes a half-court shot).

Besides over-automating player movement, the game seems to decide who's going to win before you play. I feel like I have almost no control over whether I'll win a game, because I can't control whether my open jump shots are going to fall. If you miss one or two, your team gets cold and you will end up with a shooting percentage in the 40s. I have a team with Kevin Durant, Dirk Nowitzki, and Michael Redd, and I think they're shooting about 10-20% from three-point range during our first month of the season.

One more thing the 2K series has never fixed, which bugs me to no end: the player trading menu. I have to harp on this because nobody else ever does. Say I'm trying to trade for a small forward. I hit the right trigger a few times to see just small forwards, and I start scrolling through the teams with the right bumper to find a suitable candidate. You can't tell if the trade will succeed until you add your target to the trade screen. So I select a small forward, but find out that the salary cap numbers don't work out just right or that the other team's not interested in my offer. Remove the player from the trade screen, and go back to the rosters to keep searching. But it won't go back to the last team I was looking at, or to just the small forwards, so that I can pick up where I left off. NO, it instead defaults to the Cavaliers every time, and I have to right-bumper through all the teams I've already looked at and right-trigger over to the small forwards again. Trades aren't easy, and it usually takes a lot of looking and finagling to make one work out. This idiocy just makes it even more tedious.

I have been playing 2k basketball off and on since 2k1 on dreamcast...and the question is always "which is better 2k or nba live" and my answer is 2k10 hands down. it feels as if you are actually on the court. the gameplay is extremely intense. the graphics and physics are superb as well. the franchise mode is deep and will keep you busy. but the biggest addition is the my player mode. build your player from the ground up.


Now to the bad.... If you dont have xbox live to download the latest patches to fix the bugs that were shipped with the game....DO NOT BUY! this game is light years ahead of NBA live but the bugs will turn you away. IF DO HAVE XBOX LIVE YOU MUST BUY THIS GAME! FOR THE PRICE ITS A STEAL! TRUST ME! ALL THE BUGS HAVE BEEN FIXED AND THE GAME IS SMOOTH AS EVER!

add me on xbox live lol--- mnsfinest612

i love my game. Never thought that it would be so fun. My granddaughters taught me how to play it. I would recommend it any adult or child under suppervision. Amazon was very curtios and very accuract about getting it to me on time for christmas.Thanks again.Enjoy if you purchase it.

I really think My Player mode is good idea. But this is v1, which is far from perfect. One can not choose difiiculty. Also, the AI of your teammates is very low... I have 2k11, which is much better)

The game didn't work at all due to a large ring scratch around the disc right out the box.
My brother buffed it out with toothpaste and the game works fine now. I am skeptical about ordering from this place. Terrible product quality!