Presumably the developers didn’t want to alienate more casual hoops gamers, but once again, with the right slider tweaks, NBA Live 2005 is capable of producing a great sim experience. There are definitely improvements that are clearly intended to make the game as realistic as possible, which makes the default slider settings somewhat puzzling. Dribbling moves are also more refined, and it’s possible to goad defenders into biting on pump fakes and lean into them to draw shooting fouls. There’s a wider variety of dunks and layups, and moves generally look a lot better than they did in NBA Live 2004. However, there are many positive aspects to the gameplay as well. Quirks like this prevent me from giving NBA Live 2005 the nod as the best sim game of its era. As such, running a fast break and playing an up-tempo offense is far more difficult than it should be. Your teammates tend to stop in their tracks rather than catch passes in stride, and don’t cut to the basket often enough in transition. CPU players feel a few steps quicker, and can easily outrun yon to pull away on the fast break, or catch up with you to block or alter what should have been an easy dunk or layup in the open floor. Speaking of the AI catching up, that’s probably the biggest issue with NBA Live 2005’s gameplay, even after you’ve tuned the sliders to your liking.
The AI is smarter than before, but it will still resort to cheap tricks in order to catch up or pull ahead in crunch time. It’s not uncommon to miss wide open shots and even dunks as the CPU cheeses its way to a comeback. The CPU tends to outmuscle you regardless of the players involved, and the comeback logic can be rather brutal on the harder difficulty settings. Too many blocks occur on the perimeter, even with the sliders set to zero. There are a few issues with balance however, and sliders don’t fix everything. As with NBA Live 2004, a few slider tweaks can yield some great results that are more far appealing to hardcore simheads than the settings out of the box.įurther improvements to the game’s tech allow NBA Live 2005 to play a respectably realistic style of virtual basketball, especially after slider adjustments.
The gameplay itself also makes a good first impression, though the default tuning is still slightly too fast for a sim game. Being the first game since NBA Live 95 where the year rhymes with Live, NBA Live 2005 is just really pleasing to the ear. The intro video spotlights the new All-Star Weekend mode, and concludes with Andrew Anthony – who voices EA Sports’ iconic tag line of “It’s in the game” – stating the game’s title.
Let’s take a look back at another milestone game in the NBA Live series.įrom the moment you fire up NBA Live 2005, the game pumps you up to play. It had a few issues of course, but it was still a great release, and remains a personal favourite of mine. It’s a reputation that’s well-earned, as it improved upon NBA Live 2004 in just about every way possible, and still holds up extremely well over a decade later. Many would call it the best game in the NBA Live series, or at the very least, rank it somewhere in the top five, if not the top three. That’s what makes NBA Live 2005 so impressive, as it met the standard of its predecessor and raised the bar even higher. In my NBA Live 2004 retrospective, I summed up that game by calling it a tough act to follow.
#Nba live 2003 with slam dunk patch series
Whether you’re a long-time basketball gamer who grew up with NBA Live and are keen on taking a trip down memory lane, or you’re new to the series and want to learn about its history, we hope that you enjoy celebrating the 25th Anniversary of NBA Live here at the NLSC! Today, it’s a retrospective of NBA Live 2005. To mark the 25th Anniversary of NBA Live, we’re taking a look back at every game in the series with retrospectives and other fun content! This also includes re-running some features from our 20th Anniversary celebrations, with a few revisions.
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