The menus are slick and refined (although navigation still takes a bit to get used to), and you’re even presented with highlights of the team’s star players before a game. The NBA 2K games have never been ugly from an aesthetic standpoint but they’ve always lacked the finesse and polished veneer that EA sports titles have. 2K on the other hand is the less than attractive girl but with a fully functioning brain.
I emphasise the off the court improvements here because it's always been what truly set Live and 2K apart in terms of presentation Live, and all EA sports titles are like a really beautiful girl but once you get past the surface, she struggles to spell her own name. So what, then, has 2K done to justify a purchase of 2K8 version 2, so to speak? From the get go it is obvious 2K have really made an effort to improve the game both on and off the court.
You take the last iteration of your chosen sports game, give it a new coat of polish with one or two upgrades and send it back out again in anticipation the fan will buy it despite the relative lack of improvement and while this may seem obvious to most gamers, we do exactly what the developers expect us to do. Most gamers will agree that sports games, or more so the developers of them, are guilty of what I like to call the “recoat” policy.
2K9 is the 4th instalment of the series on the “HD consoles”, and features the same in-depth gameplay that has made the NBA 2K brand so popular, and is also the first title in the series to be released for the PC. NBA 2K is that franchise, beginning in 1999 on the ill-fated Sega Dreamcast, the series has since moved onto greener pastures following Take-Two’s acquisition of Visual Concepts and the 2K series along with it. However, there has always been one series of games that for nearly a decade has battled with EA’s NBA Live series for the virtual basketball crown. Madden is one of the best selling games in the NA region, and with a whole plethora of other titles under the “EA Sports” logo, it can be daunting for other developers to step foot into this relatively uncharted minefield and dethrone the king so to speak. If there’s one thing that is agreed about American sports games in recent years it’s that EA generally seems to have the market well under control.