Durant is NBA's Elite

For the past few weeks, my life has pretty much consists of work, the NBA playoffs, work then more NBA playoffs. There's a conference finals game on practically every day so much so I begin to wonder how to fill the gap once the NBA finals is over. On Saturday Game 3, Kevin Durant of the Oklahoma City put on an awe-inspiring 4th quarter to will his team to victory. It was one of those unbelievable cold-blooded, seemingly effortless 16 straight points by a single player that just breaks the will of any opposing team.

I felt inspired but not like how you would imagine... I felt inspired to pick up my playstation 3 controller, dust off that copy of NBA 2K11 and finally hunt down that trophy designed to mock KD, the cover star of NBA 2K's rival competition - NBA Elite (which never got release of course).  Get KD to eclipse his previous career high of 48 points in a single game? I'm pretty sure he scored more than 50 points in that nuggets game this season so not a big problem. Initially I was force-feeding KD the ball so much I wondered if it would ultimately jeopardised the team to a loss but in the end, I wound up with 59 KD points on 24 of 48 shooting and a playoff win over the Dallas Mavericks in the first round. Few trophies have as much history as this, I reckon this will be one of my favourites for a long time to come.

NBA 2K12 Big 3

2K sports just unveiled the cover athlete for the upcoming NBA 2K12 and much to my surprise, they went old school again with a trio covers of MJ, Magic and Bird. Up until now, I had secretly hoped that 2K sports will changed their mind about doing another NBA 2K release this year with the looming uncertainty of NBA season lockout yet to be resolved. My copy of NBA 2K11 is just barely six months old and pretty soon the online servers will be taken offline or abandoned in favour of the new version. Worse the Legend mode will be further expanded to now include Magic and Bird's championship era even though they already made brief appearance in NBA 2K11. I suspect like the Jordan Challenge which featured different era of MJ career, the Legend mode will now feature different renders of Magic and Bird so you don't have to bear with the horribly rendered moustached Bird from the 63 point MJ playoff game anymore.

Lost among the hype of NBA 2K new big 3 cover is the pre-order dlc of classic NBA teams like Webber's Kings and Mullin's Warriors.

Could It Be Magic?

This here is the early cover art for NBA 9K which is scheduled to be release soon, a highly-regarded bastketball game series that has surpassed the likes of NBA and NBA Live. Basically if you are a gamer and a hoops fan you need to be playing this and not the latter, those much like THQ's Smackdown series have been coming out almost every year without any significant improvements.

I have yet to really sink my teeth into this series, i have played NBA 8K for a bit on my ps2 but playing it on an outdated console just doesn't do the series justice. I came close to owning NBA 7K for my ps3 but end up with Sony's NBA 07 instead because of the promised full HD support. The real reason i posted the cover art is because i have a real gripe with it, NBA K series have traditionally used the last season NBA champions as their cover art star and this season's NBA finals is just about to start today, isn't it a slight disrespectful much like those Nike commercial featuring lebron and kobe puppets? While i do think the Magic doesn't really stand much of a chance against kobe and the lakers, i'm rooting for dwight howard because i have always been a big fan of NBA big men and i liked howard's nice guy persona despite his lack of offensive moves. Maybe the NBA games are fixed like some have suspected all along?