TimeShift (PC)

Given TimeShift's long, tumultuous development cycle that saw the game change platforms, swap publishers, and miss several release dates, it's surprising the game has made it to stores at all. So it's too bad that TimeShift isn't really worth the wait, thanks to a barely-there story, extremely rudimentary puzzles, and tired first-person shooter objectives like going through an entire level just to push a button. It does have some redeeming features, though. It's fun to pause time and whale on helpless soldiers, and some of the weapons are really satisfying to shoot.

If you need more out of a game's story than "shoot guys until the credits roll because an angry soldier and a computer voice say so," you're in trouble here. If you piece together the fragmented cutscenes, scour the manual, and read the back of the box, you'll learn that a certain Dr. Krone has stolen a special suit that lets its user travel through time. This has created an alternate reality, which is a bad thing--you'll have to trust the game on that, because it's tough to figure out just what has happened that's so bad, other than a big robot spider that shoots lasers terrorizing the city. (OK, maybe that is bad.) It's up to you to take the other, experimental beta suit (ohhhh, dangerous!), travel through time, and stop Dr. Krone from doing something sinister--which he has already done, so you want to undo whatever it is he's done...or something.

Even though the story is an incoherent mess, it's still possible to enjoy TimeShift. Why? Because you can time-shift. Your suit has the ability to pause, slow down, or even reverse time--kind of like a TiVo you can wear. This lets you pause the action, run up to a guy, and shoot him to bits. Or if you're feeling like humiliating him before you kill him, you can steal his weapon, restart time, and watch as he wonders where the heck it went, and then make him dead with a barrage of bullets. It's even possible to regenerate health by seeking cover and pausing time. You can't rewind time and prevent your own death, but if you're quick you can reverse it and unstick a grenade from yourself. You only have a limited amount of time you can manipulate before the suit's energy runs out, but it regenerates quickly. The game promises all sorts of other "exciting" uses for altering the flow of time, but it never really capitalizes on the potential of the mechanic. Rather than challenging you with complex puzzles that require you to think outside the box or use the game's quality physics engine, you're mostly limited to slowing down time so you can press two buttons in quick succession or pausing time so that you can get through a door before it closes. Thank goodness for technology.

Other than the time-shifting stuff, the rest of TimeShift plays like a linear, run-of-the mill first-person shooter--and a dated one at that. Most of the level objectives are routine tasks like finding a button that opens a door or, sometimes, locating a lever that opens a door. Heck, sometimes you have to do both! There are a few scenarios where you ride around on an ATV and some others where you man a turret on an airship, but most of the time you'll be moving from checkpoint to checkpoint on foot, taking out wave after wave of unintelligent foes. It's good, then, that the gunplay is entertaining. This is mostly due to the game's powerful weapons that are so much fun to shoot. It might not be exactly challenging, but it's fun to pause time and take the crossbow that shoots an arrow that sticks in the target and then blows up, and then unpause time and watch your foe explode into a charred, bloody mess. There are other cool weapons too, like the automatic gun that looks like it shoots bullets, but these bullets cause the target to burst into flames when they hit, and then the dude screams like a little girl as he fries. Even the basic machine gun is powerful and useful all the way through the game. There's always plenty of ammo to be found, so you never have to be conservative with your bullets.

It's too bad that these powerful weapons, combined with the ability to manipulate time, make it all too easy to fall into a rut of approaching every situation in the same way. Even on the harder difficulty settings you can be successful finding cover, pausing time, unleashing a few shots, and then retreating to cover while your suit and health recharge. Enemies won't always stay back and wait for you to cap them, but their aggressiveness actually makes things easier. You can hide, watch their dot on the radar get closer, and then shoot them as soon as they come around the corner. There are a few instances where you'll have no choice but to seek shelter behind destructible cover, but those situations are rare, and there's usually someplace safe you can scramble to once you've been flushed out.

In addition to a lengthy 10- to 12-hour single-player campaign, TimeShift offers a full-featured multiplayer component. A modified version of the single-player game's time-shifting ability is found here, too. You can slow, pause, or rewind time by throwing one of three different chrono grenades. Everyone within the blast radius of an explosion is affected. It's a neat idea, but one that people seem all too keen to rely on--they just throw them like crazy when they see another person. You can play ranked and unranked matches in a wide variety of game types. There's deathmatch and team deathmatch, one-on-one, capture the flag, and a few unique modes. King of time has you try to gain control of the time sphere, which makes the person who holds it impervious to time effects, allowing them to rack up kills with ease. Another is called meltdown madness. This is a team mode where you try to prevent the other team's machine from counting down by throwing chrono grenades at it. You can also create your own fun by using the multiplayer modifiers. These let you increase players' running and jumping abilities, reduce gravity, or play alternate game types like rockets or snipers only, vampires, or last man standing. The multiplayer mode isn't exactly amazing, but it definitely has its moments.

One of the reasons TimeShift was delayed so long was because the visuals in the early versions of the game weren't up to par. It's not an amazing-looking game, but the graphics have improved significantly over time and there are some nice visual effects to be seen. Explosions look fantastic, especially when viewed while the game is in slow-motion or paused. It's not just the explosions that look good, but the object being destroyed as well. Crates will splinter, bad guys' limbs will fly in all different directions--there's plenty of carnage. The rain effects in the first level are good, too, though they feel overdone, as if the developer were showing off how hard it had worked on making the game look better. The quality of the rest of the game's visuals depend on what system you're using to play the game. The PC version looks best thanks to higher-resolution textures and a fast, smooth frame rate. The Xbox 360 has markedly lower-quality texture work and the frame rate experiences frequent hitches, especially in the first few levels.

It's ironic that TimeShift had such a long development cycle, because the game really could have benefitted from more time in development. If the story had been fleshed out more and the developer had made the decision to challenge players with tougher puzzles and mission objectives, this could have been a very good, if not great game. Instead, it's just another ho-hum first-person shooter with an interesting gimmick.

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (Xbox360)

You wouldn't have been wrong to come into Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock with some sense of trepidation. With original Guitar Hero developer Harmonix off the project and Tony Hawk creators Neversoft now on board, it would be fair to wonder if anything that made the wildly popular rhythm game franchise so awesome would be lost in the shuffle. The good news is that Guitar Hero III is Guitar Hero through and through. The core gameplay that fans love hasn't changed outside of some basic tweaks, and the long and varied tracklist is the best of any game in the series to date. If there are any chinks in the armor of this sequel, it's that some of the newer mode additions and a few odd design decisions do more to get in the way of the fun than anything else. Likewise, the extreme difficulty of some of the game's more severe songs might end up turning off newer players. Those issues aside, it's hard to argue with what Guitar Hero III offers from a content perspective, especially if you're a longtime fan of the franchise.

We won't spend a great deal of time trying to educate you on the ways of Guitar Hero if you've never played one of these games before. The quick and dirty explanation is that you have a guitar controller with five fret buttons and a strummer. Notes appear on the screen, you hit the matching buttons, and rock is made. In Guitar Hero III, you'll be making the rock with one of the best soundtracks to be found in any rhythm game. The soundtrack spans multiple eras and genres. Classic rock is represented with songs such as Santana's "Black Magic Woman," the Rolling Stones' "Paint it Black," and ZZ Top's "La Grange." Alternative rock from the '90s is present in a big way with tracks such as The Smashing Pumpkins' "Cherub Rock," Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Suck My Kiss" and Pearl Jam's "Evenflow" on-hand. Classic punk fans will dig being able to play the Dead Kennedys' "Holiday in Cambodia," Social Distortion's "Story of My Life," and the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the UK." Modern rock hits such as Bloc Party's "Helicopter," The Killers' "When You Were Young" and Queens of the Stone Age's "3's and 7's" are also available. And for all the metalheads, you get major classics such as Slayer's "Raining Blood," Iron Maiden's "Number of the Beast" and Metallica's "One." It's an all-around fantastic list with only a few blemishes here and there. It's easily a much higher ratio of quality over crap than what Guitar Hero II had.

It's worth noting the number of original tracks added into this year's game. Well over half of the songs in Guitar Hero III are the original songs by the artists, as opposed to covers created for the purposes of the game. A couple of bands, including the Sex Pistols and early '90s funk-metal outfit Living Colour, actually went into the studio and rerecorded their songs for the game, which is pretty cool. The one downside to having so many master tracks in this game is that it does make the songs that are still covers stick out all the more. It doesn't help that the general quality of the covers has also been downgraded a good bit since the last sequel. The woman covering Pat Benatar's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" doesn't really sound anything like the '80s songstress; the version of Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" in the game features a uniformly unimpressive Ozzy Osbourne impersonator; and the entire cover of "Holiday in Cambodia" has been pretty badly butchered with some weird structuring changes, badly edited lyrics, and a guy who sounds more like someone trying to parody Jello Biafra than anyone remotely authentic. Of course, the guitar parts in these covers don't suffer much and in fact do a fine job of emulating the real-life songs. It's just the surrounding pieces that rob the tracks of authenticity.

Of note as well is the fact that Guitar Hero II's focus on extreme shredding over simple yet memorable riffs is even more intense in this sequel. The easy and medium difficulties are as good a starting point as they've ever been (though even they are a smidge more difficult than previous installments), but the curve definitely takes a steep incline when you bump up to hard and expert. The jump in expertise required for each setting is far greater than ever before, and at times it comes across as just too much. As awesome as songs like "One" and "Raining Blood" are, they're so intense that it's unlikely that anyone who didn't get all the way through expert in Guitar Hero II will have a blessed clue what to do with these songs. And then there's that pesky song from extreme power metal group DragonForce, "Through the Fire and Flames." It sounds a little bit like a Dungeons & Dragons dork singing over a tape of the Contra soundtrack that's been thrown in a blender and set to "liquefy," and it is so excruciatingly, arthritis-inflictingly difficult that you'll be thanking your lucky stars it's a bonus song and not something you're required to complete to advance. Regardless, there are enough songs that do require completion that aren't terribly far behind in difficulty level that it might just be enough to scare some people off from finishing expert altogether. There's an old adage along the lines of "You win more friends with accessible fun than you do by breaking people's fingers with a fake guitar." Or something like that. Whatever. The point is that Guitar Hero III feels decidedly geared toward the hardcore Guitar Hero fan, and less for the newcomer.

Painful difficulty aside, the game is still lots and lots of fun. The core gameplay hasn't been altered much, save for a few minor adjustments here and there. Hammer-ons and pull-offs, the techniques used to hit crazy streaks of tightly packed single notes, are now easier than ever before (possibly to offset some of the extreme extremeness of the harder songs), and the notes that can be hammered on or pulled off now glow brightly to signify as such. While playing, you'll notice that the game also keeps track of your note streaks both with a counter and with periodic exclamatory text messages on the screen that notify you when you've hit certain streak milestones. There are also some changes to the way your star-power meter is displayed, as well as your score tracker, though these are mostly just aesthetic changes.

You progress through Guitar Hero III much as you would any of the previous games. The career mode uses the same tiered-unlocking system as its predecessors, with encores at the end of each tier. One wrinkle to this year's mode is the addition of animated cutscenes that sketch a minimal story about your band's meteoric rise and eventual fall (literally) into hell. It's not much of a tale, but there are a few moments of amusement here and there. One particularly interesting addition to this year's game is a co-op career mode. This works much like the single-player career mode, but you can play through with a friend who you can divvy up either lead or rhythm guitar/bass duties with. Co-op play hasn't changed much since last year's game, but this new career progression is a neat idea.

Unfortunately, it's a neat idea that's overly restrictive in practice. For one thing, there are six songs you can unlock only in co-op career, which means that if you don't have a buddy with a second guitar that can come over and spend an afternoon playing, you won't get those songs (at least until someone eventually digs up the "unlock all songs" code for the game). Also, no version of the game ships with a co-op quick-play option. The only way to play cooperatively on a single console is to play in the co-op career mode, and you have to unlock six tiers' worth of songs before you unlock all the available songs. Interestingly enough, there is a launch-day patch for the Xbox 360 version of the game that adds a co-op quick-play option. However, if your 360 isn't connected to Xbox Live, or you happen to buy any other version of the game, you're out of luck at the moment.

Elsewhere in the multiplayer arena, the face-off and pro face-off modes from the previous Guitar Hero games return, and they're still generally excellent. However, the one new addition is anything but. Titled battle mode, this mode replaces the star-power mechanic with Mario Kart-style weapons. If you hit a specific note string, you'll gain a weapon you can launch at your opponent by tilting the guitar. Weapons include broken strings, jacked-up whammy bars, amplifier overloads (which cause notes to appear and disappear randomly), and a reversal of the notes to lefty flip (and vice versa). On paper, this mode seems as if it could be amusing, but in practice it's just dumb. Most of the battle-mode matches we played were over in 30 seconds or less because one player simply couldn't recover quickly enough to get a weapon and fire back. It's basically a situation where whoever gets a weapon first wins most of the time. Even when matches do go on for a bit longer, they aren't really much fun anyway.

Battle mode actually finds its way into the career mode in the form of boss battles. Activision went out and licensed a pair of notable guitar players: Guns N' Roses/Velvet Revolver legend Slash, and Rage Against the Machine/Audioslave shredder Tom Morello. At the end of a couple of tiers in the career mode, you go head-to-head against these guys in original guitar tracks that they themselves recorded, during which time battle-mode rules apply. Nevertheless, the same balancing issue pops up. Most of the boss battles can be bested pretty quickly if you get a couple of weapons in a row. The last boss battle has you playing a heavy-metal cover of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" against a fairly obvious opponent, and that fight is considerably tougher than the other two, but it's also the last boss of the game, so it would kind of have to be. The boss-battle mechanic just feels tacked on. With only three battles out of eight tiers in the game, and only two of them against real guitarists, it feels like a quickly tossed-together mechanic that, again, just isn't that much fun.

Quite a bit more enjoyable than any battle modes or boss battles is the addition of online play for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii versions of the game. Guitar Hero has never been online before, and the ability to go online and take on the top axe grinders in the world is a huge bonus. Online options include all the offline gameplay modes. Ranked matches let you play face-off, pro face-off, and battle modes, and player matches let you do all of that plus the co-op songs. Sadly, you can't do the co-op career mode online, but at least your friends can strap on a bass and play online. There are some key differences between the three online versions of the game. The PlayStation 3 version doesn't include any manner of friends-list support, which means you can play only against random players online. The Wii version lets you play both random players and friends, though the friend options are limited to game-specific friend codes. The Xbox 360 version probably has the greatest ease of use online, with all the standard Xbox Live accoutrements, as well as easy access to downloadable songs (though, depending on your opinion of the pricing of said songs, that might be a blessing or a curse). The PS3 version should also include downloadable songs through the PlayStation Network store; unfortunately, the Wii version isn't set up for any kind of content downloads. The good news about all three versions is that they perform wonderfully online. Lag never got in the way of the gameplay experience in any matches we played.

While on the subject of differences between versions, it's worth noting that each version of Guitar Hero III comes with its own guitar bundle. Xbox 360 owners may not necessarily want a bundle if they already own the Guitar Hero II guitar, but III comes with a new wireless guitar that features a detachable neck, a much better whammy bar, better strap design, and more responsive buttons. If you weren't satisfied with the GH II guitar, this is a good upgrade and potentially worth the $100 asking price for the bundle. PS3 and Wii owners have never had a GH game before, so you will need to buy a bundle to play with the guitar. The PS3 version costs the same as the 360 one, and the guitar is functionally identical as well, save for a small dongle that has to be plugged into the PS3's USB port to make the wireless action work. The Wii version costs $90, and has the most unique guitar of all of the available versions, in that it features a connector for the Wii Remote. The remote fits snugly into a port on the back of the guitar, and the remote essentially takes over as the guitar's tilt sensor. It also does a few unique things, such as buzzing slightly when you engage star power, and playing all the missed note sounds through the Wii Remote speaker. PS2 owners also get a bundle, though unless you really, really want a wireless guitar, there's not much reason to go that route here. The new guitar's buttons aren't much better than the previous PS2 guitars, and the sync process for the wireless controller is kind of clunky. It's a nice-looking guitar, but it's not quite worth paying $90 for.

The change in developers has also resulted in a slight change in visual style in Guitar Hero III. The look of all the various characters and environments has changed noticeably, and everything has been given a more defined and exaggerated look. It might be slightly jarring to those accustomed to the standard Guitar Hero visuals, but once you get used to it, you'll find the game to be pretty sharp-looking. The guitarist characters look excellent, and even the secondary band players look more detailed than ever before (though considering how dog-ugly the singer is, maybe he could have stood to have a little less detail). The PS2 and Wii versions look about on par with one another, and look maybe slightly better than the last couple of PS2 Guitar Hero games. The Xbox 360 and PS3 versions are considerably better-looking, even over Guitar Hero II on the 360. However, the one thing that does get in the way with these versions is occasional bouts of frame-rate slowdown, specifically when engaging star power while lots of notes are onscreen. This chugging is really distracting and can occasionally throw you off while you're playing. Rhythm games, perhaps more than any other genre, really need to not slow down, and it's disappointing that this one does.

It's also disappointing that Activision has finally decided to corporate up the Guitar Hero experience with a fair amount of lame product placement and dynamic in-game advertising. It's one thing to get branded guitars and get Guitar Center to sponsor your in-game shop-- it's quite another to have several of the game's environments feature billboards that display ads dynamically, and logos for Pontiac and Axe Body Spray that pop up all over the place. It even goes so far as to have Axe-sponsored guitars you can buy in-game, and Axe-sponsored go-go dancers prancing about the stage while you play. Gross.

An abundance of advertising, a few visual issues, some overly restrictive design decisions, weak new modes, and a major upping of the difficulty level might seem like a lot of potential hindrances for a game to overcome, and yet none of these problems are big enough to rob Guitar Hero III of the same brand of addictive fun that made the previous entries in the franchise so engaging. Certainly the fantastic track list goes a long way toward that end, but the gameplay is really what sells it. Sure, the difficulty can be vexing, but the game never loses that sense of "just one more song" addictiveness, even at the height of its challenge level. Once you start playing, you'll be hooked for hours at a time, both online and off. It might ultimately just be more Guitar Hero, but that's hardly a bad thing--in fact, it's a great thing.

NBA 2K8 (Xbox360)

Developers are often criticized for seemingly doing as little as possible from one year to the next with their sports games. That is not the case with NBA 2K8. It's superior to last year's game in almost every way; there's loads of new content and the gameplay is better than ever. Issues, such as missed shots close to the basket and atrocious documentation, hurt the overall package. But this is still a game that's sure to please both casual and hardcore hoops fans.

There's no shortage of ways to stay busy in 2K8. The series has had a street ball component to it for a number of years and it's back again. It's called NBA Blacktop here, but it has been revamped and improved upon in a number of ways. You can participate in a three-point shootout or play street ball using real NBA players. The goofy story from last year is gone--you just play ball. The big addition to the mode is the dunk contest. Up to four players can choose from current stars and legends, such as Clyde Drexler, Dr. J, or Dominique Wilkins, for a three-round dunk contest that takes place in the streets of Las Vegas.

There are three parts to each dunk: the gather, in-air style, and the finish. A gather is how you start the dunk. You can bounce the ball to yourself, hop off of one foot, toss the ball in the air, and more depending on what direction you move or rotate the right analog stick. In-air style is determined the same way. Here, you can pump fake, spin, windmill, spread your legs à la the Jordan logo, and a host of other actions. To finish the dunk, you press R2 or the right trigger in the highlighted area of the meter. The closer you are to the center, the better your finish. You can also place props, such as ball racks and benches, to add a bit of flair to your dunks. It takes a little bit of practice and the game does a poor job of letting you know what you need to do (though it does tell you what you did wrong after the fact), but once you've spent some time experimenting, you can pull off some amazing-looking dunks. Because the judges are all over the place with their scoring, this mode is best played against friends offline or online when you can trash-talk your opponent and argue over scores. Losing to computer-controlled opponents on a weak dunk is no fun at all.

NBA Blacktop is nice, but it's more of a bonus--the association is the bread and butter of the series. It's still the deepest basketball sim out there, but not a whole lot has changed and it's starting to feel a bit stale. The menus have been redone, but they are still a chore to navigate. A lot of the tasks aren't much fun either, like scheduling practices and scouting future draft picks. The way you negotiate contacts is more realistic than ever and you now have the ability to include no-trade clauses. Hooray! Now you can be saddled with a bunch of horrible contracts--just like Isiah Thomas! You'll also need to assign roles (starter, star, sixth man) to your players in an effort to keep their morale up--unlike Isiah. All of these options may make it seem like going through a season of the association is a lot of work, but the effect they have on your team is minimal. It's possible to use the default roles, never schedule any practices, and scout very little yet still do just fine. But you get what you put into the mode. If you really immerse yourself in the life of an NBA GM and coach, there's a lot to enjoy here. Should you want to only worry about the rigors of a single season, you can do that in the aptly named season mode.

Once again, the NBA 2K series sets the standard for online play. There's something for everyone to enjoy here. Hardcore fans can participate in an entire season, complete with online draft. You can create tournaments, as well as play ranked and unranked matches. The game never really bothers to explain how to do it, but if you go to the online lobby page and scroll down, you'll find that you can participate in all of the NBA Blacktop modes too. Up to eight players can play together on the Xbox 360 and up to 10 players can team up on the PlayStation 3. All of your stats and progress are tracked on your player card, making it easy for you to scout prospective opponents. 2K8 takes a proactive approach to getting player feedback, not only asking you if you want to give Xbox Live feedback on a player after a game, but also giving you its own series of questions to help ensure people know what kind of player they're going up against in the future. None of this would mean a thing if the game didn't run well. Outside of free throws being a little more difficult and the referee sometimes not wanting to put the ball in play, our online experience was quite good.

2K8 boasts some impressive options, but how the game plays is most impressive. The signature jump shots in last year's game were nice, but this year, Visual Concepts has raised the bar with signature style animations. There are countless new layups, dribble moves, passes, and dunks. These new animations complement the already great-looking jump shots. You'll be amazed at how realistically the game plays and moves. The CPU does a great job of taking advantage of all these signature moves by making the players play just as they would in real life. Even though we were on the wrong end of the beating, we were dazzled as Steve Nash threw no-look passes, squeezed bounce passes through tiny openings, and drove the lane with reckless abandon. Other players are just as lethal in the game as they are in real life. Shaq's an absolute terror near the basket, throwing down vicious dunks over anyone who stands between him and the hoop; Kobe will take over a game, owning entire quarters at a time; while LeBron will beat you with his passing and scoring. It's one of those things you've got to see in action to truly appreciate how everything comes together.

You wouldn't know it from the game's horrible instruction manual (save for some load screens, there's no in-game instruction either), but there are a number of new gameplay features this year. We didn't find this particularly useful, but you can use the right stick to raise or lower your defender's hands. You can also control other players at any time, get them open, call for the ball, and then drain a shot. Another addition that will help you get open shots is a diagram that shows you where players need to go when you run a play. This is a great way to learn the proper way to run plays and should encourage you to do more than drive the line or toss up endless three pointers by making it easy to run an offense like the pros. You'll also need to run plays because your players don't do much on their own to get open. They'll shuffle around out near the three-point line, but they don't work hard down low nor do they cut to the basket much on their own. The big change to the way the game controls is that you now perform crossovers and other dribble moves strictly with the left analog stick. If you're playing from the sideline camera, it can be a tough to get the players to do what you want them to do. The system is much more responsive from the baseline view because your actions more accurately mimic what the players are doing. It's a good change because the controls were getting overly complex, but Visual Concepts needs to just swallow its pride and copy NBA Live's use of the right trigger.

These changes and additions are not huge on their own, but how everything comes together is what makes 2K8 such an amazing game. Once you get a handle on the controls, you have a wide array of moves at your fingertips. The artificial intelligence is great--it's more challenging than last year, but it never feels cheap. Even free throws, which were frustrating last year, have been made more forgiving this time around. If you toss in the fantastic signature style moves and the way they're implemented, you've got a great game on your hands.

It's too bad, then, that there are some nagging issues that keep the game from being truly remarkable. Once again, there are too many blown layups. Whether you use the shoot button or the shot stick (it's a little less of an issue with the stick), players will miss wide-open dunks and layups. They'll turn around midair and throw up a circus shot for no reason. They also seem to have an aversion to going strong to the hole. This seems to be the developer's way of keeping overall shooting percentages realistic, but it comes at the expense of completely unrealistic percentages from in the paint. It's such an obvious problem that even the game's announcers see what's going on, chiding players for missing such easy shots. There are also some smaller flaws that bring things down a bit. When double-teamed, ball handlers are too quick to pick up their dribble and often turn the ball over as a result of being tied up. Defenders charge into the ball handler to push him over midcourt for a backcourt violation, the AI does a poor job of helping you rotate defenders to cover the open man, and there are a lot of questionable foul calls. None of these issues ruin the game, but imagine how great it would be if they weren't there...

2K8 doesn't look a whole lot different from last year, but the addition of all the new signature style moves does wonders for making the game appear more realistic. Many sports games have great animations, but none of them react so realistically to what's happening, apply physics, and then transition from one move to the next so seamlessly. Player models are generally quite good, though many of the Caucasian players look downright horrifying, as do most of the coaches. The weird bug where the shorts the players are wearing tear and vanish still rears its ugly head once in a while too. Arenas look fantastic, thanks to great-looking courts, cheerleaders, dancing mascots, players on the bench reacting to the action on the court, and (ugly but active) individual crowd members. The frame rate is generally steady, but it does choke a bit during free throws and replays. The announcers do a nice job of calling the action and mix in a fair amount of game analysis as well. They do occasionally miss some big plays and there are a few situations where you'll repeatedly hear the same call, but they're generally quite good.

It is rare to find a sports game where you're in awe of the moves you see onscreen, but it's something that happens routinely with 2K8. Rather than get upset about how the CPU is picking you apart, you'll find yourself admiring how it happened and then resolving to return the favor the next time down the court. It's just too bad that such problems as missed layups, poor instructions, and a somewhat stale association mode are present because even with these problems, NBA 2K8 is one of the greatest basketball games in recent memory. Whether you're a casual basketball fan or a total hoops nut, this is the game for you.