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NLSC Podcast #512: NBA 2K25 Gameplay Wishlist

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #512 of the NLSC Podcast!

It’s Wishlist season once again, so this week, we join the community in listing our top three gameplay wishes for NBA 2K25! Not surprisingly, many of us have similar thoughts on what we want to see out of this year’s game. Following our recent sessions with them, we also discuss NBA ShootOut (aka Total NBA ’96) and Sony’s NBA 08, and compare them to their contemporaries. We’ve also got an injury update to share, and spend some time reflecting on past-their-prime players still having something left in the tank in real life, as well as being fun to play with in video games; especially when they’re familiar faces in unfamiliar places.

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!

NLSC Podcast #465: A History of Annoying Mechanics

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #465 of the NLSC Podcast!

Another NBA All-Star Weekend is upon us, but sadly, the event has basically lost its lustre for us. Call us grumpy old heads if you must, but we miss genuine competition in the midseason classic! On a brighter note, we had a blast partaking in All-Star activities in NBA Live 08 – including creating a 1988 dunk contest video, and enjoying a wild three-point shootout that went to a tiebreaker – as well as revisiting NBA 2K13 to play some Blacktop. As promised on last week’s show, we’re taking a deep dive into the most annoying mechanics in the history of basketball gaming, with our listeners also sharing their biggest frustrations on the virtual hardwood.

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!

Wayback Wednesday: The Eco-Motion Engine

Wayback Wednesday: The Eco-Motion Engine

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 NBA 2K’s Eco-Motion Engine.

Over the years, we’ve become more aware of – and concerned with – the technology under the hood of video games. The announcement that a game will be running on a specific engine may excite gamers, or disappoint them. Sometimes, we assume too much here. After all, the same engines have powered good games and bad games alike. Time, resources, and design choices that harness the power of the engine, are paramount. In-house solutions can also offer an advantage over widely-used engines such as Unreal, since they’re custom-built for a title or series.

Perhaps the most famous basketball game engine is Eco-Motion. It debuted in the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One version of NBA 2K14, facilitating a landmark release in basketball gaming. Many basketball gamers remember it fondly, and are wistful that it was replaced by tech that many say hasn’t felt nearly as good. What was it all about? Let’s take a look back…way back…

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Wayback Wednesday: Signature Skills in NBA 2K

Wayback Wednesday: Signature Skills in NBA 2K

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 Signature Skills in NBA 2K.

A key improvement as basketball video games have evolved is the way in which different player abilities are represented. Indeed, the difference between an old basketball video game that shows its age and a title that holds up extremely well is that in the former, every player tends to play the same. Whether it’s their speed, shooting ability, or another part of their game, they might as well be generic. Of course, in games like Double Dribble, they were! It worked there, but NBA games that utilised real players needed to accurately represent their skills and athleticism.

This led to the implementation of player ratings, many of which became standard across basketball video games. As games became more sophisticated, ratings alone weren’t enough. Player-specific moves and animations, as well as tendencies, helped games take the next step. There needed to be a mechanic that went beyond ratings, though; something that represented an uncanny knack or specialised skill. These days, NBA 2K achieves this through the use of Badges. Before Badges however, we had Signature Skills. In some ways, they were better than their successors. If nothing else, they paved the way for them. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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Monday Tip-Off: Hacking MyCAREER in Older Games

Monday Tip-Off: Hacking MyCAREER in Older Games

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 by recounting the fun I’ve recently had with hacking MyCAREER in older games.

Here at the NLSC, our stance on hacking modes such as MyCAREER and MyTEAM has been the same as our policy on piracy: we don’t support it. Since we already walk a fine line with modding, we try to stay on the right side of both the law and our host’s terms of service, in order to avoid any unwanted repercussions. On top of that, there’s also the matter of fairness. While we can understand wanting to stick it to a Triple-A publisher by hacking MyCAREER or MyTEAM for content and in-game currencies, it’s also upsetting the competitive balance, and ruining things for your fellow gamers.

To that end, recounting my experiences hacking a MyCAREER save probably seems quite hypocritical. Here I am preaching fairness, while going against our own rules and community philosophy; talk about double standards! If you’re grumbling, I can appreciate where you’re coming from. However, there is a distinct difference between hacking to gain advantages in the connected modes of MyCAREER while the servers are still online, and messing around with an offline save years later. In fact, that’s a distinction that we can perhaps draw in our rules moving forward, because at a certain point, hacking MyCAREER for your own enjoyment does become fair game.

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Wayback Wednesday: One MyCAREER For The Road

Wayback Wednesday: One MyCAREER For The Road

This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! In this feature, we dig into the archives, look back at the history of basketball gaming, and indulge in some nostalgia. Check in every Wednesday for retrospectives and other features on older versions of NBA Live, NBA 2K, and old school basketball video games in general. You’ll also find old NLSC editorials re-published with added commentary, and other flashback content. This week, I’m reflecting on playing through a full MyCAREER season in NBA 2K14 for PlayStation 4, during a recent retro kick.

In newer games, I’m more or less done with MyCAREER; at least as my primary mode of play. I’ve made a lot of fond memories with MyCAREER and the connected experiences, but it has become a grind, with elements that have very little to do with basketball. I’ll still dabble with those modes, but a combination of satisfaction and burnout has made it easier to move on. That’s why it may surprise you, much as it did me, that I was drawn into NBA 2K14’s MyCAREER upon revisiting the game. I was so taken that I ended up playing through an entire rookie season!

The fact of the matter is that once I’d played enough games to write my retrospective on the first MyCAREER story, I felt compelled to keep going. I was enjoying it too much to stop, and as I played deeper and deeper into the season, I knew that I’d have to see it through to the end. While there will be some overlap with the aforementioned article, this time I’m focusing on my personal experiences playing through the mode, and comparing it to my other memorable MyCAREER games. Join me as I reflect on a retro gaming experience that went back…way back…

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Monday Tip-Off: The Rising Cost of MyCAREER

Monday Tip-Off: The Rising Cost of MyCAREER

We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Start your week here at the NLSC with a feature that’s dedicated to opinions, commentary, and other fun stuff related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games. This week, I’m tipping things off with a frank discussion of how the cost of upgrading your MyPLAYER has been steadily rising in MyCAREER.

Virtual Currency in NBA 2K is nothing new. Since NBA 2K13 on consoles and NBA 2K15 on PC, gamers have been able to purchase 2K’s in-game currency and spend it on MyPLAYER upgrades and MyTEAM packs. As far too many apologists readily chirp up to inform us, it isn’t actually necessary to buy VC. It’s merely a shortcut for gamers that are impatient, short on time, and flush with disposable income…or so they’d have you believe, anyway. While the justifications for microtransactions are flimsy at best, it is true that they’ve been a part of NBA 2K for almost a decade now.

That longevity doesn’t excuse their intrusiveness and impact on game design, though scores of shrugging shills will claim otherwise. To dismiss concerns about recurrent revenue mechanics by framing them as a tired criticism that needs to be put to bed is to ignore the increasingly pushy nature of them. In all fairness, it isn’t always because someone is shilling, although that does undoubtedly happen. It’s also the result of annual releases, as we forget the exact figures of payouts and price tags; the specifics of each game’s economy. With that in mind, it might shock some people to see just how much the cost of upgrades has been rising in MyCAREER since NBA 2K14.

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Monday Tip-Off: Do We Need Those Stinking Badges?

Monday Tip-Off: Do We Need Those Stinking Badges?

We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Start your week here at the NLSC with a feature that’s dedicated to opinions, commentary, and other fun stuff related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games. This week, I’m tipping things off with some thoughts on whether NBA 2K’s MyCAREER and its connected modes are too reliant on Badges, and their general implementation.

Sim games have long sought to properly differentiate between players, beginning with detailed ratings. Those base attributes alone haven’t always been sufficient though, and so developers have experimented with mechanics such as Freestyle Superstars in NBA Live, and Signature Skills in NBA 2K. Signature Skills have given way to Badges, which like their predecessors, grant boosts and represent special abilities that the standard ratings can’t account for. As with Signature Skills, or the similar Traits system in NBA Live, they’re available to real players and career mode avatars alike.

These days, Badges are probably more important than ratings/attributes. You can max out a player’s ratings in a certain area, but it takes the effects of a Badge to ensure that they’re sufficiently levelled up. On one hand, this does make the exceptionally skilled stand out from the very good, much as Freestyle Superstars in NBA Live once aimed to achieve. On the other hand, it also means that high ratings – which are theoretically only given to the best real players, and take a long time to grind for our MyPLAYERs – are far less powerful than they should be, if they aren’t paired with the various boosts afforded by Badges. Given these issues, do we need those stinking Badges?

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The Friday Five: 5 Cheesiest Moves in Basketball Games

The Friday Five

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Friday Five! The Friday Five is a feature that I post every Friday in which I give my thoughts on a topic that’s related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games, as well as the real NBA, and other areas of interest to our community. The feature is presented as either a list of five items, or in the form of a Top 5 countdown. This week’s Five is a list of some of the cheesiest moves that you’ll encounter in basketball video games.

We all want to see basketball games continue to get better, and eliminate cheesy moves and tactics as much as possible. Well, most of us do, at any rate. Judging by some of the 2K Pro-Am games that I’ve played in NBA 2K16 and NBA 2K17, a few gamers probably wouldn’t be happy if a few of the exploits and loopholes were taken care of! Nevertheless, I feel confident in saying it’s what a majority of basketball gamers want to see, and that it ultimately remains a goal of the development teams at both EA Sports and Visual Concepts. If you look back at basketball video games through the years, you can see improvement in that regard.

No game is going to be perfect though, and completely eliminating cheese is easier said than done. Gamers are always going to seek out the most effective tactics, and while these days that usually does mean playing smart basketball, there are still exploits to be found here and there. Throughout all the generations of basketball video games, there have been unstoppable moves and cheap tactics that gamers have discovered and exploited for easier wins. For this week’s Friday Five, I’ve compiled a list of what I feel are five of the most infamous gameplay exploits; indeed, the cheesiest moves you’ll come across in basketball video games.

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