Basketball has never looked so good.

Last year's NBA 2K game was solid. There's no doubting that. It featured the same good looking gameplay that we're used to with an insane amount of fidelity in terms of the animations the series has always possessed. Yet, when I sat down with NBA 2K10, I found myself staring at a bunch of cool-looking basketball moves with the feeling of total control being a bit muted. But man, they sure did look great. While I'm happy to report that this year's NBA 2K still looks wonderfully polished even in the early build I just played, gone are all of those canned animations that constrained some of the action to looking more like a movie than a user-controlled basketball game.

This year, just about every single animation can be broken out of and altered in some way. Going for a layup but see a center looming in the lane? Simply alter your shot by tapping the shot stick in either direction (this can also be used to trigger different dunk types, including one that forces your player to hang on the rim after flushing it). In-air collisions that alter your set animations are also in; so even if you don't willfully change your shot, chances are a big center like Yao Ming is going to alter it (and, in turn, your body) for you.

Break it down, son.

Of course, interruptible animations aren't confined to driving the lane and shooting the rock. Dribbling animations can be interrupted just as easily. First, let's go over how the dribbling mechanics have changed. Rather than holding the right trigger and the left trigger or just the left trigger or some weird timed combination of the two of them, the left trigger holds most of your dribbling moves this year. Simply holding the left trigger and maneuvering the left stick gets you all sorts of moves, but this year they should all make sense.

If the ball is in your right hand and you flick it to the right, he's going to feign a crossover. If you then bring the left stick over to the left, the animation is going to bridge to a full crossover. Of course there are also variants of the crossover from there. Through other finite motions with the left stick (such as going from the left to tapping to the right to going back to the left) you can pull off things like an in and out and a double crossover. Spin moves are pulled off how you'd expect, but in NBA 2K11 the stars of the game make better use of them than ever before...

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Posted by Xavier Title NBA 2K11 Company 2K Sports Platforms PC-Xbox 360-PS3-PS2-PSP-WII Release TBA

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NBA 2K11 trailers at GameTrailers: click here