2K Sports followed up last month’s NHL 2K8 Media Conference Call with an NBA 2K8 Media Conference Call designed to enlighten us as to the new features in this year’s game. 2K does a fine job with these (actually Access Communications helps set it up) but this time we had a slightly different format.

We still had to send in a few questions prior to the call, and we had to mute our phone during the call so as to not hear rude media people typing away frantically in the background. Granted, on the last call, which wasn’t muted, my two dogs got into a fight over a rawhide chew toy and it sounded like Armageddon. But at least I wasn’t typing!

This time we also had a 15 minute open question session after the 45 minute basic Q&A. I was curious how this would play out as we’d all just blurt out questions at once. Well, it didn’t quite turn out that way.

Turns out, the open questions came at a trickle rather than a flood; it was rather awkward as I expected to have to shout over people and try to get someone to hear me. But it was dead silence for about ten seconds, which is actually pretty long when you think about it. I had a list of things that I wanted to find out about the game that weren’t answered in the Q&A but was sure that I’d be drowned out by a lot of talking reporters.

So I finally asked about CPU fast breaks, CPU defensive rotations, and CPU substitution logic. According to 2K, all of these issues are apparently fixed, so there you go. A few more questions were in fact asked…ranging from whether or not there were fights in the game (maybe that guy thought this was the NHL 2K call?) if the game allowed custom music on the 360, whether or not we’d ever see something like the Legends game in the NBA series (huh?) and whether or not the NBA will ever offer an exclusive license to EA Sports. There were open cries of, “I hope not!”

It was professionalism at its finest. Look, “I hope not”, too, because exclusive licenses are the Devil’s Children but shouldn’t we be sort of…I don’t know...neutral when we have our media hats on?

Anyway, the availability of vintage jerseys I thought was a solid question; I actually love the NBA of the 70s and 80s and would like to play with those old jerseys. The classic Nuggets unis were oh so sweet. These will be limited, but I’d like the game to have every jersey for every team since the 1960s. I mean why can’t they do that?

One quick note about the aforementioned substitution logic stuff: You can now tell the AI exactly how many minutes you’d like each player to get –which should be a huge boon to the game because last year’s sub logic was atrocious so hopefully this will keep Kobe on the floor in the 4th quarter.