Oh, Canada! You might be known as the home of hockey, but all of a sudden you’ve become the epicenter of pro basketball as well. Not only was the NBA All-Star Game just held in Toronto, but you can also …
Oh, Canada! You might be known as the home of hockey, but all of a sudden you’ve become the epicenter of pro basketball as well. Not only was the NBA All-Star Game just held in Toronto, but you can also find NBA Live Mobile for free in the Canadian App Store right now.
As discovered by Touch Arcade, it’s very much in the vein of EA’s Madden NFL Mobile, utilizing a card-based system for obtaining new players and improving your team and a combination of live events, single-player seasons and asynchronous head-to-head play — you play the first and third quarters against a human team being controlled by the AI, and vice versa in the even numbered quarters — as its main gameplay modes.
Ah, but how does it play? Not that badly, as it turns out. Using a virtual thumbstick to move players and a combination of buttons to pass, drive and shoot (holding down the last of those until a meter fills to give you a better chance to make it), offense isn’t tricky at all, and superstars like Steph Curry have special abilities to make them even more dangerous scorers. Defense is a little less intuitive, but it’s not a bad package taken as a whole.
Another nice touch is that you can save season games after each quarter if you don’t have time to play the entire thing in one setting. It’s hoops in small, bite-sized chunks, and again, a pretty good translation of the Madden NFL Mobile formula to another sport.
We’ll assume that its arrival in the U.S. is a matter of weeks and not months. In the meantime, we can help you with a Canadian iTunes account if you can’t wait to try it out. We the North, indeed.
