Xbox Live NBA 2K3 impressions

We took a 90-percent-complete build of NBA 2K3 through its online paces at Sega's Sports Summit today in New York. The game has been tightened up a bit since our last look at it in terms of gameplay and graphics, but we were most interested in seeing how it handled on Xbox Live. We hopped into a game set up against the QA staff at Visual Concepts in San Rafael, California. The game played pretty well, although there were noticeable hiccups during gameplay, due in part to online testing on the game. The voice communicator worked fine, as did the voice masking. NBA 2K3, like NFL 2K3, will support a bare minimum of voice masks, although it should theoretically be possible to download more into the game once Xbox Live is up and running.

NBA 2K3 is currently slated to ship this October for the GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox. The Xbox Live service is set to launch November 15. Look for more on both in the coming weeks.