Can I just say... eww?
I just got live 08 today, and for all the effort that went into Madden and Tiger Woods, I can see why EA didn't feel the need to advertise this one coming out. Its atrocious, not just bad... atrocious.
The visuals are smooth, that's the only good thing I can say about it. But they're ugly, ugly as the face of Satan himself... the players look cartoony, and they don't move anything like human beings. The game is played in an over-the-shoulder 3rd person view (sort of like World of Warcraft), and your Mii keeps appearing on the screen with tips like "Dunk now".
And the controls are majorly wonky, clearly designed for the "family play" experience. You go into a jump shot by tilting the Wiimote up, and release by tilting it back down. You pass the ball with A, or if you want to get really clever, directional pass the ball with the D-pad. Move with the joystick, crossover by tilting the nunchuck. I thought well... that's great, my dad could do that, then I spent 20 minutes in game looking for instructions on how to do advanced controls before I realized, to my horror, that this in fact was the advanced controls, and the sum total of what its possible to do in Live 08. The family style controls, near as I can tell from the half-screen tutorial, basically amounts to the game playing itself while you sit there and hold the wiimote. You might be able to call plays or something (not that there's any depth to the playbooks) but that's literally all the family mode player is doing.
And to make matters worse, EA managed to trim down their already anemic franchise mode offering. And when I say trimmed down, it would be more accurate to say "cut out", because there is literally no franchise mode left in the game. Instead you get a single season mode option, though to be honest I can't imagine playing 82 games of this monstrosity anyhow.
I'd get into what a joke the player rankings are (the Boston Celtics, one of the favorites in the eastern conference this year, are the worst ranked team in the entire game, even worse ranked than the national teams of crappy countries), but frankluy if you were looking to see if this would be a good sim, you probably stopped a long time ago.
I'm literally longing for the days of NBA Live 2003 for the Gamecube... hell, I'm longing for the days of Celtics versus Lakers in the NBA Playoffs for the Sega Genesis. Is this what almost two decades of work has left us with EA? Is this really the best you can do with basketball anymore?