Welcome to this week’s edition of The Friday Five! This is a feature that I post every Friday in which I give my thoughts on a topic that’s related to basketball video games, the real NBA or another area of interest to our community, either as a list of five items or in the form of a Top 5 countdown.
If you’re relatively new to basketball video games, or at least the basketball gaming community, you may not have much of an idea of how things used to be when it came to previews and interactions with the developers. With all the tidbits on social media, developer blogs, in-depth interviews here at the NLSC and around the web, live streams, and so on these days, we get to learn a lot about the upcoming editions of NBA Live and NBA 2K before they come out. This allows us to be well-informed, and in turn, savvy consumers.
Of course, the downside of such in-depth coverage is that some of the mystery is taken out of basketball gaming. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – with games coming out every year, we want to know whether the latest iteration is worth spending money on – but it also means that we don’t often get to be surprised by something really cool in basketball video games. Every so often though, EA Sports or 2K Sports will announce something that catches us off guard, and that’s what I’m talking about today: five times that I was surprised by basketball video games. Let’s get to the Five!