562 - Look at me, I'm blogging.

I just watched the Celtics Lakers match up and I gotta say, Rajon Rondo has really stepped up this year. He has proven to be a valuable player on a team of superstars. But of course it was Pierce that stepped up hitting that 3 pointer to put them in the lead instead of a tie.
What? You say Pierce didn't hit the game winning 3? He did today when I watched the entire game play out in NBA2k8.
I hadn't played the game and I figured a good way to see how good this game is would be to have the computer play itself and I would watch as a fan of the Celtics.
The game looks great but I can't believe we don't have a way of doing a 360 video of players and mapping the video all the way around the model. I think I talked about this on the show one time and I got some people telling me I was crazy, but if you've got any theories as to why we're not using video mapped player models in games.
The players still look way to stiff and wired up when switching animations and the faces still have a ways to go.
The players AI seemed to be pretty solid. Having just watched the Christmas game that Gasol seems to have taken very seriously, I had a good idea of how these teams should be playing, shooting, passing.
The game was close, never more than 2 point lead for either team until the third quarter.
Here are some of my quick thoughts.

1. Rondo for some reason decided not to take a final shot before the half choosing to dribble around the 3 point line before the buzzer came. Ok fine, go in down by 1 without a shot.
2. There were no replays happening despite the "frequent" selection made in presentation. They did give me nice highlights at the end of the quarter. The camera is sometimes in the wrong place or too close or just too jittery to make it feel like real TV highlights.
3. Guys don't wipe the bottom of their sneakers THAT much in the NBA
4. Love the mop guy but give him more than 2 animations for movement since I'm looking at him every time there is a foul shot.
5. The parquet floors look sick in Boston.
6. Love the crowd animations they've done a good job with it.
7. The play by play is ok, It felt natural enough for 1 game. I imagine it would get repetitive if i played this as much as madden.
8. I've got the menu open after the game which gives me some post game packages including Player of the Game, Top 3 Plays, Hot Zones, and Signature Highlights from the Celtics win over the Lakers. The music playing has been great, "The soundtrack features a generous mixture of rap and rock running the gamut from Run-DMC, Devo, Stone Roses on down to exclussive J Dilla collaborations with Common, Q-Tip, Talib Kweli and Madlib." 
9. Phil Jackson looks like Phil Jackson
10. Cheerleaders are cute
11. Mrs Allgames gave me the look when I explained I was only watching the 20 minute game, not playing it. I told her it was a good game and invited her to stay and watch the second half with me. She is not home now.

The second half of the game the Lakers started to pull away. They had a 9 point lead going into the fourth quarter. This is odd as the Celtics are the ones who seem to have very strong 3rd quarters against the Lakers as was the case on Christmas. But a couple of steals by Rondo and Pierce pushed it to a tie with under a minute to go.

Just like in the NBA, the time outs and fouls started happening as the Lakers took a four point lead. The Lakers had a 1 point lead with 7.3 seconds to go when Pierce took the inbound pass and drained a 3 pointer to give the celtics a 2 point lead.
With 3.3 seconds left the Lakers got the ball to Kobe who threw up a brick to end the game.

I think I need to do the same thing with LIVE, but I'm not sure they let you do computer vs computer. I know they took that out of madden, not sure why.
Would love to hear your feedback on both NBA games and your prediction for the Celtics and the NBA as well.

Happy New Year

UPDATE: I just realized there is no comment area below this so I suppose I will link it to a forum thread http://forums.allgames.com/showthread.php?p=355866#post355866