NBA Live 365 : the news is out!

EA Sports finally made their NBA Live announcement (which you were sternly warned about yesterday) with regard to the new artificial intelligence feature. It's aptly called "NBA 365" as it means you are provided with an updated NBA experience for every day of the year.

Part of this development means that every NBA Live player has a "Dynamic DNA" -- which as the name suggests, brings a constantly changing number of characteristics for that player. If this is as advertised on the carton, we've got a very exciting move in the future of sports gaming right here.

Here's a roundup of the news on the E3 announcement:

• A couple of nice updates from our friends at Sports Video Games, here and then again here.
• Report at the NBA Live Series Center from someone who has tested out the new NBA Live 09 and attended the initial event for the media. He points out that, as you would expect, there may well be a charge in the future for the update service -- but not for the 2009 iteration.
• The official list of new features, direct from EA's site.
• Another great hands-on report, this one from Pasta Padre.
• Oh and by the way, no, Brandon Roy is not on the cover of NBA Live 09 -- not to my knowledge anyway. That cover and other fantasies can be found at the IGN Boards.

One thing which I don't think enough has been made of, is the NBA Rewind feature. According to EA this is:

"NBA Rewind* - Think you can do it better? Rewrite history and replay last night's game with the updated statistical data that recreates identical conditions including injuries, hot/cold streaks, tendencies and player DNA."

I think Pasta Padre said it pretty well in his report:

"This is actually the aspect that I feel may have the most widespread appeal, though the others in attendance seemed to dismiss it going as far as to ask why time was spent on it (apparently very little as it just uses data that was already available). You’ll be able to replay any game from last season or the current one. Games are expected to be available for replay the very next day. Not only will this have every game available but you’ll be playing them with AI specific to that game alone. And if certain players were injured at the time of the game, or trades were made since then, it won’t matter. The players who were on the roster at the time of that game will be available. This mode will present something unique for every game you “rewind”."

That's pretty exciting stuff, to be able to replay any game in the past two seasons with true to life conditions! Now you can make the NBA Finals finish the way they were meant to, Laker fans...