Share. Share! SHARE!!!

Last year's College Hoops was the best version yet, and the short story on this year's, 2K8, is that it also looks great, has great features and plays smoothly, but with a few wrinkles. The only point up for debate is whether it's worth the retail price to upgrade.

Right off the bat, you'll have the option to download rosters with player names from the 2K Share service. Everyone knows why college players don't have their names in the game when it's shipped - we get it. They aren't pros yet. But the time for someone to allow customers to share rosters passed long ago, so megakudos to 2K for stepping up. It's not 2K who's providing the rosters, so don't worry about anyone's playing eligibility. 2K Share just allows users to share roster files. Thank you, thank you, thank you. (Now put it in every other sports game.) 2K8 plays a lot like 2K7, and that's good. It's still a little faster than it should be (adjustable), free throws are a little too easy (adjustable) and the CPU players hit a few too many shots to be realistic (yes, this is also adjustable). Team Unity is still a feature we choose to set to '0' and ignore, but others report to enjoying what it does to live games. And in order to get defenders to switch in man defense or shift in zone you have to move that awareness slider up. With all that out of the way, the game is a lot of fun out of the box and our slider settings are, as always, a moving target. The fact that different settings show obvious results (and that we're playing the game enough to enjoy them and tweak them) is quite a statement.

One feature that is beginning to feel like a grind is recruiting. If you follow the business of college sports, you know recruiting is a full time job. If you want to make this game a full time job, you can. Recruiting happens both in and out of season and can take up as much of your time as you let it. You can manage every prospect's calls, visits, mood changes, relationships and shoe contracts (just kidding about that last one). You can even watch and play with them in the ABL (Amateur Basketball Leagues). But at some point even the hardest of the hard core might consider letting the AI handle some of it so you have time to play some basketball.

The biggest change from 2K7 to 2K8 is 2K Share. Getting rosters should have been this easy ever since all our consoles used the Internet out of the box. For some of us, that one feature will be all we need to hear to commit to another version of College Hoops.