With over 5 million copies sold worldwide and over 20 Sports Game of the Year awards, last year NBA 2K11 allowed you to become the greatest with MJ & the Jordan Challenge mode. This year the NBA 2K franchise is back and bigger than ever, providing fans with the opportunity they’ve always dreamed of - to finally end the debate as to who are the best teams and players of all time with the all-new NBA’s Greatest mode. Featuring 15 legendary players such as Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Dr J, NBA’s Greatest lets you relive some of the NBA’s most celebrated careers and rivalries, painstakingly recreated in historical detail. Along with innovative gameplay features such as Total Shot Stick Control and a new Post Game System, NBA 2K12 puts fans centre court of an unprecedented basketball experience...

Basketball is more an American sport than a UK one. So, unless you're an American or a foreign fan who follows the sport religiously, then the stats and celebrities will mean very little.

The biggest problem I had with this game is that it came without any instructions. And for a game with this amount of complexity that's a bit of problem. So I had to button mash my way through several games before I could work out what controls did what - and even then I was a little unsure. Eventually, after much cursing and sweat, I got to grips with how to play and settled down to start to enjoy the game play,

The graphics are hit and miss (but mostly hit) with the managers looking a little freakish, but the players movements looking incredible. In fact several casual passers by the office thought momentarily I was watching a sports channel rather than playing a console game.

The commentary is also worth mentioning. It's not intrusive and it's actually a commentary... not just meaningless phrases tossed in at random. I was incredibly impressed at how well this was constructed. The main chat is at just that level that you don't really notice it as an annoying audio track.

You can pick this up and play out of the box (once you know what buttons do what) with the simple quick game mode that throws you straight into a game without having to worry too much about setting up the line up.

For those who are a little more serious about the sport, you can enter into the best-in-class Association mode (basically the game's franchise mode) or My Player mode.

Then there's the NBA’s Greatest mode which allows you to control 15 of the game's best characters. But make no mistake there's enough quality material to keep even the most hardened basketball fanatic glued to the screen for months.

This is, without a doubt, the finest basketball game ever released - and certainly one of the best sports games out there.

9

Nick Smithson