Nba live 2002 is not a perfect game by any means but it's not horrible either.
This game is worth playing if you're new to the series. But if not... Then i don't know if it's worth to buy. Because it's almost the same thing as live 2001.
Game modes:
so the game modes are pretty much the same as they were before. You'd have standart modes like quick play, season, playoffs and 1 on 1. But a franchise mode was included in this year's game. You can do things such as trading players, dropping them to free agents and all that good stuff. And instead of dollars you have nba live points.
There's also a new practice mode. You can select any player you want from the NBA and play with him as much as you want.
Gameplay:
the gameplay is almost the same as it was before, so for example if you want to do crossover or a spin move, you can't really control the direction of it which is quite bad. But the worst thing about the gameplay is that there's no zone sets in the game. The game loses a lot of strategy because of that. As before it's still really hard to rebound the ball. Most of the time the ball bounces off the floor before someone grabs it. It's pretty unrealistic. The game has a lot of dunks. While some of them can look realistic most of them are not. Like i've never saw Shaq doing a windmill alley-oop. Also there's no signature dunks which is kind of a letdown. One thing i forgot to mention is the difficulty. The A.I. Is quite weak, so when you first play the game, go straight to the Allstar or Superstar difficulty if you wan't at least some challenge.
The last thing. Nba live 2002 has one of the best free throw shooting mechanics i've ever seen.
It's much better than it is in Nba 2k2 for example.
That's pretty much about it. I have to say this game is decent, so despite it's flaws i think it's worth to buy, because the nice gameplay and mind blowing graphics are one of the most inportant things in video games.