Aside from the face-lift to the dynasty mode, there have been some tweaks made to the actual gameplay. The most notable of these is the "freestyle air" feature, which allows you to double-tap the dunk button in midair to change your shot. If you go up for a dunk and see a defender coming over to challenge, you can double-tap and change your shot to avoid getting blocked. You're also given new choices for hitting the offensive glass. Now, instead of the computer deciding when your player tries for a tip dunk, tip-in, or rebound, you can manually try for any of these three options by pressing a different button. As in real life, tip dunks are rare but satisfying, and tip-ins can sometimes be executed in situations where grabbing the rebound outright would be impossible.

Incremental updates have been made to the basic gameplay.

The developers have also made adjustments in other areas. New entry-pass animations have been added, so you'll see guards lobbing balls into the low block, or sometimes using a bounce pass to get the ball past a defender. You'll also see new scoop layup and dunk animations around the basket, allowing the more athletic players to fluidly score even when they're pinned behind the backboard or standing directly underneath the basket. The "pro hop" function has been weakened as well, perhaps too much so. Last year, executing the pro hop would push defenders back, often leading to a free dunk. This time around, using the pro hop on a defender will result in an offensive foul, or the ball handler losing control of the ball. In fact, it seems as if it's almost impossible to safely execute a jump stop in traffic at all, making it seem all but useless in NBA Live 2005. Finally, freestyle dribbling (using the right analog stick) is now effective only when playing as a guard or a small forward. If you try to execute fancy moves with a clumsy power forward or center, you can expect to lose the ball immediately. Sorry, Dallas Mavericks fans--no more killer crossovers with 7'6" Shawn Bradley.

Unfortunately, many of the annoying flaws in previous Live games pop up in Live 2005. Players still have a strange "force field" around them, which makes it easier to stay in front of players, but can result in some cheap out-of-bounds calls as you "push" the ball handler toward the sideline or baseline. Players still stop to catch passes, instead of continuing to run, so don't expect many real fast breaks off outlet passes or steals. This is doubly troublesome because defenders seem to recover much too quickly when they're beaten, especially at higher difficulty levels. And when you do manage to get out on a fast break, with teammates on your flanks, you'll find that they never finish running toward the basket as they should. Instead, they always pull up at the wing right around the three-point line, which is the opposite of fundamentally sound basketball.

As far as control is concerned, the PlayStation 2 version of the game stands out as the best, because the button layout of the controller makes it easy to access all the critical buttons. The Xbox is a close second, with only the alley-oop function (mapped to the somewhat hard-to-reach white button) being somewhat difficult to use. The GameCube layout is easily the worst of the three, as the button layout on that controller makes it difficult to pull off even simple maneuvers like a jump hook. What's more, the Z button is mapped to two different functions, which can be confusing.

Graphically, NBA Live 2005 isn't a whole lot different from last year's game. The game looks very good on all three platforms in the three-point and slam-dunk competition modes, and features some extremely detailed player models. However, there's a noticeable drop-off for the PlayStation 2 and GameCube editions when you play a regular five-on-five game, with a big decrease in player-model detail and much flatter lighting. The Xbox version doesn't see nearly as steep of a drop-off in the regular gameplay modes, and as a result, it's by far the best looking of the three console versions of the game.

Like last year's edition, NBA Live 2005 features excellent sound. You'll hear crowds cheer and jeer the action on the court, along with the sounds of sneakers squeaking and the ball bouncing on the floor. Rim-rocking dunks sound appropriately powerful, while soft jump shots produce a subdued swish. The celebrated duo of Marv Albert and Mike Fratello make a return in NBA Live 2005, giving the game great play-by-play and color commentary. New to the broadcast team are TNT's Ernie Johnson and Kenny "The Jet" Smith, who handle the announcing during the all-star weekend for the dunk contest and the three-point shootout. Like Albert and Fratello, they are immediately familiar and likable to most NBA fans, and their more playful and familiar style provides a nice change of pace. There's also a collection of hip-hop tunes from EA Trax, which aren't quite as good as last year's but still fit the basketball theme well.

The NBA Store makes an appearance in Live 2005, with unlockable jerseys and other extras.

Both the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions of the game ship with online functionality. You can expect the usual array of features: ranked ladders, lobbies, news, and chat, as well as updated sports scores and messaging through EA messenger. As far as online stability goes, our tests produced mixed results on both platforms. In some games we experienced very noticeable latency, with choppy frame rates and players seeming to stutter and teleport through their animations. Other games played out much more smoothly. This inconsistency was present even before the servers opened up to the public, leading us to wonder how well the servers will handle the load once players begin to fill the servers.

For better or worse, the dunk contest is the centerpiece of the NBA Live 2005's new features, and certainly it's a much better implementation of a similar mode in ESPN College Hoops 2K4. But it's tough for us to say that the dunk mode really adds a lot of value to the franchise, and it's also likely to prove too difficult for most casual players to fully grasp anyway. Beyond the new implementation of the all-star weekend, longtime players of the Live series will enjoy the revamped franchise mode, as well as the incremental tweaks to the basic gameplay, although both aspects of the game still have noticeable flaws. All things considered, NBA Live 2005 is a very good basketball game but doesn't advance the franchise as much as we would have hoped.