ESPN NBA 2K5 (PLAYSTATION 2 PS2)

ESPN NBA 2K5 is a basketball simulation video game developed by Visual Concepts and published by Sega and Global Star Software. It was released in September 2004 for PlayStation 2 and Xbox in North America and February 2005 in Europe. The sixth installment in the NBA 2K series, it is the successor to ESPN NBA Basketball and the predecessor to NBA 2K6. Ben Wallace of the Detroit Pistons is the cover athlete; this is the first time in the series that a player other than Allen Iverson has been featured as a cover athlete. It was the last NBA 2K game to be released by Sega before the company sold Visual Concepts to Take-Two Interactive, forming 2K Sports. It is also the second and final game to feature ESPN branding on its front cover (the ESPN branding would be dropped, making later releases once again simply referred to as "NBA 2Kx" and later "NBA 2Kxx".).