Electronic Arts attempted to thread the needle with its latest NBA Live abomination and Visual Concepts stole the rock, raced back the other way and dunked the ball with authority. It's not that its latest basketball title, NBA 2K6 is just a little better than Live, it's far superior. What its developers have managed to do is tweak the gameplay just enough to almost eradicate the series' woes, and the result is a fast paced hoops sim that'll let you finish on the break but not before punishing you on your way to the rim.

When I first looked at NBA 2K6 I struggled to notice the new improvements. It was, after all, admittedly difficult when EA was showcasing Live's new graphics engine, silky smooth player animations, that new fangled Freestyle Superstar control, and dangling Marv Albert in front of me like a carrot, but this year, I refused to be the ass, so I sat down and really dug into Visual Concepts' latest b-ball title and was delighted to discover that while it shares the same visual appearance as some of its brethren, the gameplay has been tweaked and improved upon to such a degree that it's almost an entirely different game.

The biggest noticeable improvement (aside from the lack of that spiffy ESPN presentation) is how speedy the game is. Long criticized for being too slow, the 2K series has choked on Live's dust, but this year, the developers kicked things up several notches by injecting their game with several gallons of rocket fuel. Even the slowest teams are capable of zipping by the competition, so fast breaks will now, more than ever, burn the hair off your face. Coughing up the ball has some serious consequences, but that leads to the second coolest gameplay improvement.

Unfortunately for yours truly, who just loves making cross court passes, the AI has been sent to the Larry Brown clinic for the defensively impaired and it's graduated Suma Cume Laude. They're so hungry and in tune with what you're doing that almost every bad pass will be picked off. This includes miracle cross court heaves, bad tosses to the post, and atrocious bounce passes that in the past would've found their way to a target even if it meant going through two defenders. What this basically means is you'll get away with less shenanigans. However, this defensive pressure is the most important element to the entire game because it contrasts the new and improved up tempo style. You can't raise the bar in one area without tweaking the other, and the result is a product that forces its players to think smarter and ultimately play better basketball.

The improvements don't stop there. I was very pleased to discover that now, and for the first time in the series, there's dual player control. The idea behind it is you're able to basically maneuver two players at once and bark orders to them, allowing you to hit a wide open man for a three or an alley-oop. But what I love the most about it is being able to control a point guard during an in-bounds pass. Instead of the game forcing me to make a dangerous pass to a point guard that's already at the half court mark and consumed by double coverage, I can bring Jason Kidd or Steve Nash to the ball.

Then there's the Shot Stick. In previous 2K games the player doesn't have complete control over his or team's shot selection. If a guy has his back to the basket and the shooting button is pressed there's no guarantee that he's going to spin around and perform a hook shot or baseline jumper. Often times he'd do some crazy ballerina like maneuver that would end in a reverse lay up clanging off back iron and it really sucked, especially with a few seconds left to go. While that'll still happen if you commit yourself to pressing X all of the time, this new innovation (which has been mapped to the right analog stick) frees you of that frustration. Basically, if you tap Up on the stick a player will attempt a basic shot, Down performs a reverse, Left is a left handed shot, and right is a right handed shot. Going for a dunk, Up is your standard issue basic slam, Down is a reverse, Left performs some fancy move, and Right will give you an emphatic rim rattling slam. It took me some time to get used to, but once I bought into the system it began to feel more and more natural.