It's hard to remember, but NBA Live was once a challenger to the formidable NBA 2K. If you care about aggregated ratings, NBA Live 10 and NBA 2K10 finished in a dead heat. Live had stolen away one of 2K's top designers. It was fargin' war. Then EA Sports burned down everything. We haven't seen the series since 2009.
Maybe people aren't cooing over it the way they are the NBA 2K14 hype reel released Thursday
Hall-of-fame stars from the NBA's past will be a part of NBA Live 14, though exactly how isn't known, as one of the game's designers took to Twitter to roll out some early details of a title that will have a lot to prove when it arrives.
Reading between the lines of an open letter by NBA Live's new executive producer, one understands that whatever comes next in that franchise is really no continuation of last year's effort, which, like its 2010 predecessor, was aborted a few weeks before its assumed date of release.
In 2010, EA Sports brought NBA Elite 11 to E3 as a shootaround demo only. I remember this vividly. You played as one player in a practice setting, learning the timing of the new stick-shooting controls. If you still have the ill-fated NBA Elite 11 demo, go to its practice mode, that's what we saw three years ago.
NBA Live 14, assuming it ships
