"If you're at all like me, the baseball season's chipping away at its schedule merely means the NBA season is that much closer to kicking off. So imagine the excitement when 2K Sports today released new details about the passing mechanics in NBA 2K6 and gave us a glimpse of the box art for the Xbox 360 version.

2K Sports has enhanced the basic directional passing and lead passing in NBA 2K6 for more accuracy and realism, with alley-oop passes able to be performed at anytime. Of course, in order to complete a successful alley-oop, the timing and situation must be right, so don't go you won't want to go lobbing the ball from the opponent's baseline, or the pass will fly out of bounds or result in a turnover.

New to NBA 2K6 is also "Icon Lead Passing," a feature allowing gamers to perform a pass to a specific player and lead that player to a designated area on the court. In other words, gamers will be able to use athletes with great passing attributes to perform flashy passes without needing to pop in NBA Street V3 (read DailyGame's review).

In addition to releasing this new passing information, 2K Sports sent along the box art for the PS2, Xbox and Xbox 360 versions of the game. The box art for each is darn near identical, but we decided to share the Xbox 360 version, since that's the only next-generation system coming out this year."