NBA Live 09

By 2008, EA Sports was running two basketball games at once. There was the NBA Live people wrote about, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 version selling itself on Dynamic DNA and daily data feeds that mapped where a player actually took his shots. And then there was the PlayStation 2 build, which inherited the name, the presentation package and the rosters, but ran on an engine that had been iterated on since the PS2's middle years. Knowing which of those two you have in your hands changes everything about how you approach it.

What survives on this hardware is a competent, slightly stiff simulation of five-on-five basketball. Player animation is keyed to a set of canned transitions, so drives to the rim resolve in a handful of recognisable ways and contact under the basket has the tin-can quality that late PS2 sports titles never fully solved. Defence rewards positioning more than reaction. The isomotion dribbling that had been the series' signature for several years is still here, and it still asks you to learn a stick vocabulary rather than press a button, which is either the mode's best feature or its most annoying depending on how much time you give it.

The franchise mode is the reason to keep it installed. Multiple seasons, drafts, trades, the slow work of turning a lottery team into something. It is unglamorous and it holds up, largely because season management does not depend on graphical fidelity or animation quality. The same is true of the practice and shooting drills, which are dull on their own terms but genuinely make you better at the game underneath.

What dates it hardest is the presentation. Commentary loops early and often, crowds are wallpaper, and the broadcast package that felt sharp in 2005 looks thin against what the same publisher was putting out on newer machines that same autumn. This was the tail end of a specific arrangement, where a large install base kept last-gen sports releases alive years after the development attention had moved elsewhere.

Taken as what it is rather than what the box art implies, there is a decent game of basketball in here for anyone who grew up with this particular control scheme. It is the sound of a long-running series still turning over on an engine nobody expected to be running in 2008.