For now though, I'll talk to you about NBA2K12 because that's pretty much all I've been playing over the last couple of days. I decided to buy it because it was cheap on Steam (which is also the reason I buy a lot of games). Anyway, here we go:
This isn't a review because I haven't played enough of it yet. I've barely scratched all the different game modes. The one I've been playing the most is the one where you create your Basketball man and join a team and start playing out your career. Goodness me, it's addictive, and I'm not even very good. Well I say I'm not very good...I've won the "Rookie of the Month" award twice now, although that could just be a gameplay thing that makes you want to keep going.
In this Create a Player mode, you start out by playing a single game in front of all the bosses of the teams in the NBA. Your performance is rated and after the game you go into a little interview situation with some of the teams where they ask you questions and you can pick one of four answers, the most amusing ones being the options which might as well be labelled "I am an arrogant ass". This is a nice little touch that helps you connect more with your guy more than in similar modes in other sports games.
So you get drafted by a team, and then work your way up from bench warmer, to starting line up. As you play, you earn skill points by doing good things, like scoring, assisting, good defending and so on. However you also lose skill points by not performing as well, committing turnovers, missing your shots etc. Then you can use these skill points to increase your attributes, like shooting, defending and passing. It could just be that I'm bad, but these skill points seem to accumulate very slowly, at least in relation to my main point of reference, the create a player mode in Madden 12. In that game I had pretty much maxed out all of my main attributes about halfway through my second season.
Anyway, that mode is great, and the gameplay is very fun. All of the animations look really slick, and most importantly, your player usually does exactly what you want him to do. The most annoying thing about Fifa (other than Sweaty Goals) is when you see a great opportunity for a pass, you hit the button, and your player tries to pass to the wrong guy and it gets intercepted. The game looks GREAT as well, and they've done a really good job of making you feel like you're watching a real NBA game. There's the Halftime Report where you get taken to other games happening at the same time, little cutaways in between quarters showing you upcoming big games, and a few other neat little touches.
On top of the great gameplay, the commentary is phenomenal... by far the best I've heard in any sports game. They seem to know what exactly is going on, and how it relates to the overall game, and even the season. The commentators can also be in the middle of a thought, and then break away to some big play that just happened in the game. Then after that, they'll say something like "Anyway, back to that..." and carry on with their thought! It's just the little touches like that that make this game really impressive, and I'm not surprised that it won the sports game of the year at the VGAs.
As I said, I've barely touched on the other game modes. I look forward to playing games as a whole team, and I'm told that the mode where you play historic games is really well put together too.
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