Last year on the PS3, 2K Sports dominated on the court, spanking Sony's first-party hoops release. This year, things will be more interesting for the Sixaxis crowd. In addition to a greatly improved game from Sony, EA Sports joins the fray. After getting its next-gen feet wet with a couple of lackluster versions of its Live franchise on the Xbox 360, the sports giant roars onto the PS3 with NBA Live 08 -- one of the most solid versions of its basketball sim in years. It still might be a step behind 2K's offering, but not by a whole lot.

The strong showing of Live 08 is mainly due to timing. The last few versions of the game have been derailed by goofball concepts that didn't work and that took away from a realistic hoops feel. Thankfully, both the Freestyle Superstar and X-Factor ideas from last year's game have been bagged; they created far too much of a caste system. The Freestyle Superstar system resulted in too much of a separation between the "haves' -- the superstars who could do absolutely nutty things in the game -- and the "have-nots' -- the other 90 percent of the league. The X-Factor seemed almost like an admission of how unbalanced the Superstar system made things, and gave a random player on each team the chance to attain temporary superstar status and abilities if he played well enough. Live 08 takes things back to the basics. Better players are going to play better. Marginal players are going to be more average. No more magic power-ups and no more superhuman players.

While there have been several new additions to Live 08, the main new on-court tweak is the ability to see your players' hot spots. From the pause menu, you can scroll through your roster to see who's the hottest from where. On the fly, you can check out the hot spots of your current ball-handler. While most of the time, we found it visually interesting, but gimmicky -- Hey look! Shaq is far more dominant when he has the ball down low! -- there were times when it was helpful. Late in games in which we may have lost a starter or two because of foul trouble, it was cool to be able to see the strengths and weaknesses of some of my bench guys.

Also making its debut in Live 08 is international ball. You have access to eight teams from around the world and can either toss them all into a bracketed tournament or see how someone like Argentina does in a scrimmage against the Cavs. While it's cool to see a guy like Tony Parker playing for the French team, we can't imagine anyone playing with the international teams a whole lot.

Gamers are probably going to stick with the traditional gaming modes -- single games or the multi-year Franchise game. The Franchise mode is just as deep as that found in 2K's game. You not only have to hire a coaching staff and deal with a budget, but you have to make sure that the day-to-day operations of the team -- training, scouting, etc. -- go just as smoothly as what happens out on the court.

For those who are into guys wearing the wrong uniforms, there's the Quick Pick Play mode. Here, you pick a team and then fill in the roster using other players in the league. I'm guessing it's for guys that might want to see all the dudes on his fantasy hoops team wearing the same jerseys and shorts. If you've always wanted to see Kobe, KG, and Amare Stoudemire sporting Bucks unis, here's your chance.

When it's finally time to hit the floor, we hope that you either like hoops trivia or dig "loading" screens, because things take a while to get rolling here. To their credit, both 2K's and Sony's games avoided such lengthy load times. On the plus side, your knowledge of questionably important NBA information will increase thanks to the number of trivia answers you'll be forced to come up with before every game.

Control-wise, the game does a lot of things that you'll like and some that you won't. As in previous versions of Live, shooting is split between the square and circle buttons to handle dunks and jump shots, respectively. It gives you more command of your guy and lets you do some cool stuff like opting for a short fade-away jumper instead of trying to stuff it if you're having trouble down low. On the negative side, it just doesn't feel as cool as being able shoot with the right stick like you can in 2K's game. Having the right stick free to do some funkier ball-handling is a pretty good consolation prize, though. In the future, when we develop a second right thumb, we'll be able to have the best of both worlds. In the nearer future, I also wouldn't mind seeing some motion-based controls using the Sixaxis. Sony's NBA 08 uses it, and while it doesn't feel completely intuitive, I'm guessing that some developer somewhere will figure out a way to incorporate it.

The look of the game falls somewhere between 2K's and Sony's games. There's some definite slowdown, which we didn't find in either of the other games, but some of the player movements seem more fluid than in the other games. Players seem more like they're a part of their environment. In 2K8, it sometimes seemed like they were skating over the court as opposed to running up and down it. The player models and faces are sharp, as well, and if you need to settle a bet with a friend about anyone's tattoos, you'll be able to do it here.

In the real world, this is already shaping up to be an exciting hoops season -- except, of course, if you're a Blazers fan whose season was dashed when Greg Oden went down. In the virtual world, things are just as exciting. While NBA 2K8 might be the overall winner in the hoops war, EA Sports' NBA Live 08 isn't too bad as a runner-up. This definitely doesn't feel like the franchise's debut on a new system. Things are good and can only get better from here.

This review was based on a retail copy of NBA Live 08 that was supplied by the publisher. Surprisingly, they sent it to him without first making sure he had a current and valid Game Reviewer's License.