Honestly, this was one of my bigger disappointments in my demos and interviews. While this was a part of an hour long demo with other games that Chuck will be covering, NBA 2K9’s trailer and demo that we were shown was a pretty big letdown. I was hoping for a deeper look at the game itself, but from what I was being shown in the demo, it looked quite a bit similar to NBA 2K8.

Visuals, for the most part, haven’t changed too much.  The faces have been cleaned up a bit and the motions of players do seem to be a bit smoother, while the graphics for the stadiums, the floor, and coaches have all been touched up as well. I will say that this is largely in part to what seemed to be a better of system of doing shadowing. The shadows of players seemed to be follow a little more realistically than past versions of the game itself.

However, on the opposite end of the spectrum, I did see some of the same quick and clunky movements of past versions of the game. While a player wanting to block a shot would have to time the jump rather well, I saw Kevin Garnett do a really quick move with what looked like his arm blocking the shot, but it just didn’t seem natural at all. Some players have that really quick movement to them, depending on what you are attempting to do, but that certainly isn’t a good thing.

Truthfully, I don’t have anything else to really tell you. This was all that we had to go on was the short trailer and the three minutes or so of gameplay. The demo itself was a letdown, as we simply watched one of the developers play the game with no real explanation of anything that was going on, things that were touched up, or any upgrades that were made. This could mean a myriad of things, ranging from the product may not be anywhere close to completion or there just hasn’t been many things added to this year’s version.  We were told that 2K Sports will be revealing something that will be even better than NBA Live 09's Dynamic DNA system but were not told specifically what that was going to be.

NBA 2K9 is slated for a release in October 2008.