Big thanks to EA Sports Canada for hooking us up with an early copy.

In the days of Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, NBA Live was a testament to how sports games should be made. NBA Live ‘95 still ranks as one of my favorite sports games ever made. But in the past couple of generations, the franchise has fallen on some hard times. While the 2009 installment has made strides from past efforts, it still has a long way to go to catch up with the dominant 2K basketball series.

As usual, EA Sports has pushed out its hype machine for a couple new features. The big one here is the introduction of NBA Live 365, a truly revolutionary concept (albeit similar to a feature of NBA 2K9). Live ‘09 introduces Dynnamic DNA into the game, a concept used in the real NBA by a company called Synergy Sports. Synergy Sports is a dynamic engine that calculates player ratings, tendencies and all sorts of data from every single game on the schedule. While DNA encompasses about 60% of Synergy’s data, the concept is still the same.

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