NBA Live

This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at the approach of having separate shoot buttons in NBA Live.

If you asked me which basketball video game has had perfect controls and gameplay mechanics, I’d have to say we’re yet to see it! Obviously perfection is an unrealistic goal in general, but even if we amend the definition to mean near-perfect and without any major criticisms, I don’t believe any title truly qualifies. Even the best basketball games that come extremely close in that regard have had at least one quirk with their controls and mechanics. It may not render them unplayable or unenjoyable, but there’s still something about the concept that’s flawed.

That’s basically how I feel about the separate shoot buttons in older NBA Live games. It initially worked and was a good solution as far as deepening shooting controls, but then was taken to the extreme in NBA Live 07, exposing its flaws. It’s an interesting situation though, especially when compared to similar attempts to expand the passing controls. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at the Atmosphere settings in NBA Live.

Following a decade of duds and dormancy, it’s easy to forget how innovative NBA Live was, even after NBA 2K became the premier brand in sim basketball gaming. With that being said, if you’re been playing basketball video games long enough to remember a time when NBA Live was still widely considered a viable, or indeed even a preferable choice, you’ll probably remember NBA Live 10 as a strong release. I’ve seen people nominate it as the best game in the series, and while I appreciate it a lot more following last year’s retro kick, I’d only go so far as to say it’s one of the best.

I do see why many of my fellow gamers give NBA Live 10 the nod, though. It did several things right after a few rough years for the series, and appeared to be steering it in a better direction. NBA Live 10 still holds up today, and boasts a few features that newer releases – including the latest NBA 2K games – actually lack. One example that I’ve yet to cover in-depth here in Wayback Wednesday is the game’s Atmosphere settings. They weren’t unique to NBA Live 10, but it could be argued that the first implementation of the concept was the best. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #479 of the NLSC Podcast!

With some big stories and events in the NBA right now, our attention turns to real hoops this week! From the Denver Nuggets making their very first NBA Finals, to Carmelo Anthony announcing his retirement, to the latest sad and bitter tirade from Scottie Pippen, we’ve got some thoughts to share. Speaking of real basketball, we also join the community in talking about the pre-game rituals and inspirational material that gets us pumped up to play pick-up and league games. As for the virtual hardwood, we discuss a false narrative regarding the style of NBA Live and NBA 2K during the 2000s, and shout out some excellent content creators in the community. In this week’s mailbag, we’re taking a look back at the Overall Ratings of the top seven active players in ESPN NBA 2K5.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:06:18 — 45.9MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!

From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #478 of the NLSC Podcast!

Games that we wish we played more, seasons that we wish we finished, and saves that we wish we still had, are common tales among basketball gamers. This week, we join the community in reminiscing about some of our biggest basketball gaming regrets! A misconception about a job listing also prompts us to address the subject of NBA Live rumours, as well as clickbait content. Additionally, we touch on whether a theoretical future NBA Live should be sim, arcade, or a sim-arcade hybrid. We also reflect on some spectacular highlights in last week’s NLSC Top 10 that had us all buzzing, and provide an update on reaching Year 6 in NBA 2K14 MyCAREER.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:17:08 — 53.3MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!

We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with some reflections on how I prefer to start a game with realistic rosters, but end up with fictional lineups and outcomes.

Realism is relative when it comes to the virtual hardwood. I’m sure I’m not alone in admitting that as basketball video games became more sophisticated and encouraged a more strategic approach, I realised that my style of play wasn’t as “sim” as I thought. If nothing else, I was quite content to toss a more realistic style out the window if I desperately needed buckets, and use reliable tricks that would help me get them. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. The goal is to win – whether you’re up against the CPU or another person – and to enjoy the games that we play.

My point is that even those of us who value the sim style will take some liberties with realism from time to time. Indeed, it’s inevitable in franchise and career play. Those modes invite us to create our own reality, whether it’s placing ourselves in the league, or donning our GM suits to make the trades we wish our favourite team would in real life. The fictional results and player movement make playing through multiple years in franchise and career modes interesting, creating alternate history and fun scenarios. However, despite the appeal of these fictional outcomes, I’ve always preferred to begin new franchise games with real rosters, rather than shake things up right away.

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Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five lists five decisions that burned goodwill with basketball gamers.

As a fanbase, we basketball gamers have demonstrated that we’ll put up with a lot. There have been a number of decisions and debacles with hoops gamers over the years that should’ve cost companies dearly, but most of us are back the very next year, buying the new release. In our defense, we do have an interest in getting a new game for the latest season, and unfortunately we don’t have the variety in the space that we once did. At the same time, we’ve become far too tolerant of issues that other fanbases would protest far more passionately.

With that being said, there have been decisions – particularly from EA Sports and 2K – that have burned goodwill. Quality was obviously a problem for NBA Live that ended up eroding significant trust in the brand, but to that point, it also squandered goodwill that it established in its heyday. NBA 2K has maintained a higher quality and sold far better, but there are gamers who do follow through on their insistence that they’ll boycott future releases. Even if the bottom line isn’t affected, these decisions that burn goodwill still damage a game’s reputation, to the point where we don’t feel the same brand affinity as before. In short, this is how publishers have lost face and fans alike.

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m paying tribute to some very useful software in our modding community: DB Commander.

There have been a number of important modding tools developed over the years. The early NBA Live editors tipped everything off, bringing modding to games that were definitely not designed with it in mind. They were followed by the NBA Live Toolkit, which made editing the new roster database files so much simpler. The EA Graphics Editor and other tools expanded modding (or patching, as it used to be called) beyond rosters, facilitating a plethora of custom faces, jerseys, courts, and more. When NBA 2K came to PC, REDitor II, RED MC, and other utilities made modding viable.

However, one of the most useful tools in NBA Live modding didn’t come from our community. That wasn’t unusual of course, as some of our most frequently-used modding tools were originally developed for other EA Sports PC releases. The one that I’m talking about today is a commercial solution, though many of us did stick with the shareware release. That program is DB Commander, developed by T&T Solutions. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #468 of the NLSC Podcast!

What better way to celebrate March Modness than by discussing some of our all-time favourite mods? We join the community in reminiscing about the mods that we’ve most enjoyed playing with, as well as the ones that inspired us to get into the hobby. We’re also sharing some stories behind creating fixes for games, and recap a session with a work-in-progress missing legends roster for NBA 2K10. The NLSC NCAA Basketball 10 Tournament has also tipped off with an intense game, and we’re looking forward to more great virtual hardwood action. Indeed, whether it’s picking up tools to mod or firing up favourites to play, we’re mad about basketball gaming this March!

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:15:01 — 51.9MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!

From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #467 of the NLSC Podcast!

As March Modness tips off, we’ve received word of an exciting retro project that we’re keen to see come to fruition. We’ve also been working on our own projects – some of which have already been released – and announce our upcoming NCAA Basketball 10 tournament. Recapping some recent retro pick-ups leads us to reflect on how much fun it is to play on original hardware, even with the convenience of emulators. While we’re in a retro mood, we also discuss the historical content that NBA Live needs to have if/when it returns, and share some suggestions from our listeners. In this week’s mailbag, we challenged the community to guess the top-rated Legends in NBA Live 2004, and point out some of the most disrespectful ratings for historical players in those rosters.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:11:12 — 49.2MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!

Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five ways that NBA Live modding was better than the NBA 2K modding scene.

It’s no mystery as to why I was far more involved with modding NBA Live than I am NBA 2K. NBA Live, and in particular the PC version, was the game that I grew up with. It’s the series that this site was founded upon – the NLSC did officially stand for the NBA Live Series Center, after all – and it was tinkering with my favourite hoops titles that got me into the hobby of modding. By the time NBA 2K came to PC, I was beginning to get burned out on creating mods, and it also took me a few releases to really warm up to the series.

With that being said, I am interested in creating mods for NBA 2K, and have been trying my hand at various roster projects. There have been several barriers that have stood in the way of releasing work, including free time to complete those projects, and the need to learn new methods and file formats. It’s been an interesting journey, and I hope that I can release some NBA 2K mods in the future. There are undoubtedly some aspects of NBA Live modding – or patching, as we used to call it – that I prefer. It’s why I’ll always have some desire to tinker with old favourites, as the heyday of NBA Live modding was a special time in our community. Here are five reasons why.

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Welcome to March here at the NLSC, and the sixth annual March Modness! In case you’re unfamiliar with the event, throughout the month of March, we’re celebrating our modding community. Needless to say, modding is a big part of what we do all year round, but March Modness is a time to reflect on the hobby, and get even more productive and creative!

As usual, this also includes a giveaway. If you upload a mod for any basketball game to our Downloads section during March, and include “March Modness” in the description, you’re automatically in the draw to win a copy of NBA 2K24 PC later this year (full terms and conditions can be found below). Congratulations once again to last year’s winner, kobedurant!

You’ll also want to keep an eye out for my regular features throughout the month. I’ll be discussing some topics related to modding in Monday Tip-Off and The Friday Five, as well as taking a look back at some classic mods and modding tools in Wayback Wednesday. I’ve also got a couple of mod releases of my own lined up, and will be spending some further time in the “workshop”.

I’m looking forward to celebrating modding, seeing what our talented community creates, and getting in on the fun myself throughout March. A big thanks as always to everyone who contributes to our modding community!

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m reflecting on when webrings and Yahoo! GeoCities were major parts of the basketball gaming community.

Want to make me feel old? It’s getting much easier the closer that I edge to forty, but an effective method would be to ask “Andrew, what do you mean by webrings, or Yahoo! GeoCities?” Yes, it’s a sign that I’m getting older, and that I’ve been online for a long time, and how much the internet has changed, that there are people who will wonder what I’m talking about when I mention Yahoo! GeoCities and webrings! In an era where it’s all about algorithms and SEO, with a number of platforms for content creation and self-promotion, they’re antiquated concepts indeed.

Still, like many things from the early days of the basketball gaming community that don’t need to make a comeback, they’re nevertheless nostalgic for those of us who remember them. At the same time, I’m also grateful that better solutions have been developed, because it certainly was the Stone Age of the World Wide Web. So, what’s the deal with webrings and Yahoo! GeoCities? Let’s take a look back…way back…

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Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five provides five reasons as to why NBA Live had the best All-Star Weekend.

As I’ve said numerous times in previous articles and on the NLSC Podcast, the fall of NBA Live and its disappearance from the basketball gaming space has led gamers to forget how great and innovative it was in its prime. That of course is assuming you’re old enough to remember NBA Live’s heyday in the first place, as there’s a generation of basketball gamers that didn’t grow up with NBA Live at its peak. There was a time when it was the brand leader though, pioneering concepts such as franchise mode, right stick dribbling, and realistic tendencies.

And of course, NBA Live 2005 brought us All-Star Weekend mode. It wasn’t the first representation of the NBA’s midseason classic on the virtual hardwood. Konami had featured the All-Star Weekend in the NBA in the Zone series, and most sim games have represented the All-Star Game (or at least allowed us to use the East and West All-Stars in exhibition play). EA Sports built Jordan vs. Bird around the Slam Dunk Contest and Three-Point Shootout, and NBA Live itself had also featured the latter. When the series adopted the full All-Star Weekend experience however, it was the best representation of the event to date. Here are five reasons to back up that claim.

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at the final few NBA Live games that were released on PS1.

The launch of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S has resulted in an interesting situation as far as multi-generation support is concerned. Obviously, the ninth gen consoles are receiving the flagship version of NBA 2K as far as technical innovation and features. However, the eighth gen version – which is also the one ported to PC – hasn’t been completely left behind. With NBA 2K23 in particular, 2K made a point of trying to implement as many features from the new gen version into the prior gen release. There also continues to be cross-generation support in MyTEAM.

Looking back through decades of console launches and multi-generation releases for basketball video games, outmoded platforms haven’t always received this kind of love and attention. It helps that nowadays the gap isn’t quite so wide, and the architecture is far more similar to the previous gen. The limited availability of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S has also left many gamers stuck on the previous generation longer than planned. When it comes to the final NBA Live games for PS1 back in the day, they didn’t stack up to their new gen successors quite as impressively. At the same time, they had some strong points of their own. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at Freestyle Air in NBA Live.

The entire history of basketball video games provides us with countless examples of developers striving for deeper controls. From the addition of sprint and steal buttons, to right stick dribbling and advanced shot types, the games have evolved to give us more and more control over the action. In the early to mid 2000s in particular though, we saw major additions and frequent changes as developers attempted to implement mechanics that were long-term solutions, or could pave the way for them. Dual analog gamepads becoming the standard peripheral also freed up buttons for new functions.

When NBA Live 2003 introduced us to right stick dribbling with Freestyle Control, it was indeed a revolution. The ability to perform specific moves on cue instead of just having to hope for the best with our press of a generic dribble moves button changed basketball gaming forever. However, while it was vital that we had more control over fundamentals such as dribbling, stealing, and stance, we also needed to direct the action when we left the virtual hardwood, and that’s where Freestyle Air comes in. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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