Good, but has its faults.

User Rating: 8 | NBA Live 2005 GC
One of the major problems I have with this and many other basketball games is that it just misses being in-depth enough with the players to get a good feel for how the NBA really is. At its core, it is just another NBA game. There are some nice additions to it though.

I like the fact that they have the NBA All-Star Weekend with the Freestyle Dunk Contest on the side. The dunking and 3-point games are a good distraction to play with friends for a while before realizing that it is the same as other NBA games. Some things I do like are the icons to show what players skills are highest and the smoothness of running certain plays. I generally find myself a little mixed up with the scoring though. I always win easily if the game is anything between rookie to pro, and almost always lose if it is anything higher. It seems that the concept of difficulty isn't a smooth transition between each level of the game. Plus, the controls for the dunking contest can be a little hard to figure out. You can perform a move correctly and still not have it work right.

There are some problems with the game, but they are ones that they can fix in later editions of the franchise.