Oh, the dunks have changed a little too. Press and hold the Circle button and release at just the right time and you'll catch the ball before it drops, flick it back up into the air and then re-dunk it after using the rim to launch yourself back up to perform a double-dunk. This can be done at any time, though it's obviously more impressive while the GameBreaker is activated. Even normally, though, the moves are absolutely insane, and easily one of the sickest additions to the already showy gameplay.

If the on-court action has been freshened up, the create-a-player goodies (and yes, this is still the core of the single-player experience, since you'll actually have to earn a rep by winning games on street ball courts all over the country) reek of pine. Though we weren't able to see the create-a-player interface during our hands-on time when we dropped by EA's offices earlier this week, we did learn that the game would employ an all-new RPG-lite contextual points system. In English, this means that the more you do something -- block, sink long-range shots, dunk, steal, etc. -- the more experience you'll build and the better you'll get at it. When you hit your first major threshold, you'll gain the ability to do a particular skill far, far better, and when you max out a particular area, it'll be your Master Skill, a move that you can nail every time.

Though we'll have more in-depth hands-on impressions when we get a proper build of the game in the office a little later, we should probably spend a little time geeking out on just how good the game looks. The previous games' sort of stylized lighting has been injected with steroids, throwing huge shades of red and blue on the screen during GameBreakers or tinting things with a sepia tone when checking out older games. And of course there's the detail; things like little wisps flitting around your character while he busts out GB tricks are a nice touch, but the detail in the player models -- particularly the faces -- was remarkable. It's still stylized, sure, but now that the game is running in HD, you can actually pick out players just based on their faces.

The courts, too, are no longer fenced-in, tight little arenas. They're massive, ornate recreations of real-life venues. Venice Beach, for example, has all three main A, B and C courts in place in addition to the "official" blue court. The amount of detail here, though was staggering, and no corners were cut; actual stains from soda spilled by fans watching the action were turned digital, trees are rife with leaves, neighborhoods are fully polygonal, down to houses and cars. In essence, the courts actually feel like snapshots of real locations thanks to the almost unnecessary amount of detail that's poured into the game. To look a couple hundred feet off into the distance and see a house that you'll never actually see in the game textured and lit perfectly just makes the game that much more visually immersive, and EA Canada deserves some serious props for really tapping the graphics hardware of the next-gen systems.

Being big fans of the series around the office, we were a little worried at first that a totally new control scheme would mess things up. Instead, it appears it's done exactly what EA had hoped: revitalized the series while giving it an appropriate level of juicing to match the leap in power of next-gen systems. Frankly, we can't wait until we have a proper build of the game spinning happily away in our PS3 debugs so that we can just play the game more. If our initial impressions hold up through an updated preview in a few weeks, and, more importantly, once we've digested the final game, this could easily be the deepest, most over-the-top, hands-down coolest iteration of the series created thus far. Yeah, it shows that much promise.

We'll have more for you as soon as we get it, but hopefully a handful of new screens and movies will paint as good a picture as these 1500 or so words. You'll get more them very, very soon.