NBA Live 2001

EA's basketball series had spent the late nineties doing roughly the same thing every autumn on the original PlayStation, and the jump to Sony's new machine in the winter of 2000 was supposed to be the break in that pattern. It mostly wasn't. What the PS2 version bought was resolution and bodies: players with recognisable faces and shoulders, courts with reflections in the hardwood, crowds that no longer looked painted on. Underneath, the dribble-drive-dunk rhythm was familiar to anyone who had put a season into the previous year's game.

That is not the insult it sounds like. The core here is still one of the more readable takes on five-on-five of its era, built around isolation moves on the wing and a shot meter you learn by feel rather than by watching. Post play is thin, help defence is more suggestion than system, and the AI has a weakness for leaving the baseline open once you've pulled a defender out. Learn that and the game becomes generous quickly.

The season and franchise structure was where the series always earned its repeat purchases, and it does the job: drafts, trades, the slow accumulation of a roster you actually care about. Rosters frozen in 2000 now read as a time capsule more than a simulation, which is its own small pleasure if you remember that season.

Playing it today, the thing that dates hardest isn't the graphics but the animation blending. Players snap between states instead of flowing through them, and a contested layup can resolve in ways no body would allow. The sixth generation would sort this out within three or four years, and when EA's Freestyle control arrived it made everything before it feel like a menu of canned moves, which is exactly what this was.

Still, there's a directness here that later, heavier entries lost. Two players on a couch, no tutorials, no card economy, a game that starts thirty seconds after you turn it on. The basketball is coarse but it is legible, and it moves at a pace that flatters a pick-up game between friends more than it does a solo grind. It is a launch-window sports title doing launch-window sports title things, and it is honest about that in a way its glossier descendants are not.