NBA Live 2k10

EA Sports finally did one of their best products. In late September of 2009, Electronic Arts finally published NBA Live 2k10, and made it available for all gamers who have been waiting exhausted and impatiently. This particular game is the outcome of a unique combination of the Motion Tracking technology, Modeling and Texturing. This combination, also happens to be one of the this that make it so special.

Let's get started with the high reputed and widely used Motion Tracking Technology. This system was used in hundreds of movies since its Invention in 2005 by a german Industrial Designer. What it does and how it operates is, basically, with pinpoint stickers that are placed on to the actors joint places and important spots that the VFX managers think would be appropriate and easier to track down the movement of the person, computer receives reports regarding the movement and later on they apply the movement to the 3d model that was made according to the story. This technology helps Visual Effects teams to speed up the process almost indefinitely and get close to perfect results concerning the movements. For example, this technique was used in Lord of The Rings to imitate Gollum's movements as close to real as possible, and the result was really satisfying.

So with this tool they replicated the basic movements (they used a tracked basketball to get the balls movement right as well) of the players. "Without this tool," Visual Effects Manager Artun Genius emphasizes, "we would be able to publish the game by 2015 optimistically with the same quality, maybe longer."

Another essential thing is that they paid considerable amount of attention to the realistic level of the texture. Every sweat drop every skin texture is thoroughly and throughout inspected and then place on their places. Each player had their own skin texture particularly cut out from the very pose they gave to on their team rosters. This was a challenging duty for it was supposed to be done by digital imagery artists and very carefully no to do it sloppy. It took the team to gather all the info for the players , the court and ball about a month.

Modeling was one of the other challenges. Animators had to make new models and not use the old ones since this version was going to be a revolutionary in EA's history. So They used 4 pics for each players and there was 4 people working only on this department. It took them a solid 4 months to complete all the teams, the coaches, the court and everything.

One of the awesome features in this game was, as the previous one, it would acquire updated information from online, NBA's official website itself, and show if the player is injured, you wouldn't be able to play that player until he got well. One new feature is that, NBA Live 2k10 updates the ratio of each team each week and determined their shooting , rebound and block percentage and ranks each team according to this option. Apart from that, these features are optional and can be turned off at any time.

I loved this last game of EA. It is way more realistic and more fun to play with. Anchors have done a great job again and if you are a basketball fan, you should give this game a shot!