Starting out the game, training drills will help you both bulk up stats and learn the basics of the controls and mechanics. More training-style bits are thrown in throughout the course of your character's story, but for the most part sculpting your player's stats is done in real time with the actions you take.

Blow a bunch of shots and your stats will go down. Take the time to set up properly and avoid blocks and you'll slowly ratchet them up. More importantly, though, how you play as part of the team is just important. Sure, you can focus on your character, creating some flashbulb-worthy moments that get the crowd pumped, but it'll be at the expense of your team's stats -- and more importantly you'll get your coach in your face and your agent high-fiving you for nailing that new endorsement.

Keep in mind that this is all in addition to having the usual gameplay modes you're used to in a normal basketball game and it's obvious that 989 isn't just pumping out another roundball-themed entry after a skipped year. In fact, it's quite possible that this is the most ambitious basketball sim ever created. Forget trying to cover all the bling and housing goodies, this is a basketball game that is seriously trying to cover the whole experience and making sure that with some fancy integration of storylines and Hollywood-style plot points, you really do get the feeling that you're going to have to live through not just the endless cash and sneaker deals, but the real repercussions that come with it.

Normally, we'd just leave a preview there, but it does bear mentioning that the graphics and sound have gotten a nice overhaul as well. This isn't just minor tweak what are normally stiff, stilted animations and a re-recording of crowd noise, 989's programming team has beefed up the graphics engine to ensure even more impressive likenesses and arena renders than past games have ever seen. In fact, the voice work and motion capture data shoved into the game are nothing short of a quantum leap in what has been seen in past games.

Take a look at the screenshots we've tossed up from the event, but understand that there's really no way to see how smoothly the improvements have melded with the new shooting and physics systems than to see it in motion. As soon as we can have some real video of the game, we'll be sure to do so, and rest assured that we're more than committed to making sure we track the progress of 989's effort.

It seems a little odd to be praising the efforts of a developer that until now has been something we admittedly snickered at not a year or two ago, but we're more than willing to eat our words. 989's work, even from a technological standpoint, stands as one of the biggest leaps in production value and overall advancement that we've seen in a long time. This really could be the start of not just a me-too kind of effort from Sony's sports department, but an honest-to-God paradigm shift in how sports games are presented.

It'll take a couple more play-throughs, and certainly with more experience with the overall NBA Life mode, but the core that is in place is undeniably solid and shows an astonishing amount of detail. This is the kind of basketball game that could simultaneously hook the casual I-only-like-arcade-basketball-games and still satisfy the basketball sim fanatic in a way no game before it has been able to do. We'll be sure to give you and update as soon as we can get it.