NLSC Your source for basketball video 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 with some thoughts on the duality of MyNBA Eras.

Look, I realise how annoying it can be when someone qualifies their criticism with compliments. After all, it can come across as disingenuous, or too timid to stand by critique. Unfortunately, when the discourse is rooted in finding contrarian gotchas to dunk on someone who has dared to criticise what you like, it’s a necessary evil. On top of that, when it comes to a feature such as MyNBA Eras, credit where credit’s due. It’s a fantastic concept with some great features that once seemed like a pipe dream. I don’t want to downplay that.

However, there is a duality to MyNBA Eras. It’s impressive in so many ways, and yet rather underwhelming in others. There are aspects that feel lazy and lacking, despite the fact that a ton of hard work and effort has gone into the mode. The ambition is admirable, but there are examples of putting the cart before the horse. There’s depth to the experience, but there’s also quantity over quality. In short, MyNBA Eras is indeed awesome, but there are ways that it could and should be better. Some of them may be easier said than done due to matters of licensing, but to that point, it makes the mode simultaneously comprehensive and half-baked. This is the duality of MyNBA Eras.

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Patch 1.3 is now available for the PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X version of NBA 2K25. As with all title updates, it should come through automatically as long as you’re online. If it doesn’t, try restarting your console or Steam client, or checking for updates manually.

The release notes for NBA 2K25 Patch 1.3 are as follows:

• Addressed an issue that could cause multiple versions of MyPLAYER to appear in the NBA in MyCAREER and potentially prevent certain quests from completing.
• Fixed a hang that some users were reporting when attempting to use the Social menu.
• Resolved error messages and other reported problems when attempting to launch the PC version under certain conditions.
• Fixed connection issues that could occur when playing Starting 5 games in the City.
• Stability and performance changes have been made to improve the overall playing experience.

I’ve created an article in our Wiki to document all of the patch notes for the PC, PS5, and XSX version of NBA 2K25, which you can find here. As always, the community is welcome to help us keep our Wiki resources up to date, so by all means add future patch notes if I don’t get there first. Feel free to share any thoughts on the update in the comments below, as well as join in the discussion here in the Forum!

Get ready for more fantastic highlights from the basketball gaming community in the NLSC Top 10 Plays of the Week, curated by Dee4Three! New and old games alike are featured in this celebration of spectacular moments on the virtual hardwood. To submit your clips, post them in this topic, or hit up Dee on Twitter.

NBA 2K25 is out now, and the community hasn’t wasted any time in using it to create highlights for the NLSC Top 10 Plays! To that point, the new game makes a few appearances and has even produced the #1 play in its launch week. Retro gamers shouldn’t worry though, as the classics are still well-represented in the countdown, and will continue to be moving forward. You know what to expect by now: huge dunks, acrobatic layups, clutch plays, slick moves…everything that’ll get you fired up to hit the virtual hardwood this weekend. Let’s get to the action!

What was your favourite highlight this week? Sound off in the comments below, and once again, get in on the fun by sending us your best plays! Remember, as long as it’s a basketball game, it’s eligible for the countdown. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to us on YouTube for more basketball gaming videos.

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 ideas that were abruptly abandoned.

As with other genres of video games, basketball titles have come a long way since their early predecessors, thanks to a combination of technological advancements and inspired innovations. Of course, not all ideas are good ones. In the best case scenario, an unsuccessful idea can be retooled into something that achieves the intended result. If there’s no salvaging an idea, then it’s better to simply scrap it, never to return. The willingness to pivot or outright abandon a concept that just isn’t working has been to the benefit of developing better basketball video games.

Of course, an idea isn’t necessarily a failure just because it was abruptly abandoned. Indeed, there have been several features, modes, and mechanics that were quickly nixed, despite their merit and popularity. It isn’t always clear why a seemingly good idea was abruptly abandoned, but it can usually be chalked up to technical challenges, or the adoption of a supposedly superior solution. Mind you, even if there is a sensible explanation – or we can make an educated guess – it isn’t any less frustrating when we lose something that we like. As we prepare to dive into NBA 2K25 and check out its new features, here are some memorable ideas from past games that didn’t stick.

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With the early tip-off in the books and the official release looming, we’ve opened up the modding sections for NBA 2K25 in our Forum! This includes the usual boards, namely one for all releases, previews, questions, and so on, and one to consolidate tutorials, guides, and FAQs. As you can see, we already have people exploring the possibilities!

To that end, as the community prepares to dive into some NBA 2K25 modding, I’ve also added the necessary categories to our Downloads database. For those who are unaware, we do offer file hosting facilities free of charge, the only requirements being the need to register a Forum account (also free), and to follow the community’s rules regarding permissions, decorum, etc. As of this post, we’re awaiting our first release, but that isn’t surprising given that NBA 2K25 is a New Gen port.

There is some exciting news on that front, however. InFaMous has discovered that the PC version of NBA 2K25 includes a mod.exe file that both exports files and creates a mods folder, demonstrating native mod support. Once again, the community is still working everything out, but this is a very encouraging development to say the least! More information can be found here. Additionally, I should note that any custom rosters for the console versions are also welcome to be promoted in the modding section.

As I wrote about in Monday Tip-Off, I believe that we have an excellent opportunity for a fresh start with NBA 2K25 modding. As such, I encourage everyone to make use of our facilities, share knowledge with each other, consider open source projects, and make great mods freely available. As always, if there’s a way that we can better serve the modding community – for NBA 2K25, future games, and classic titles alike – by all means share your suggestions. With that being said, welcome to a new season of modding here at the NLSC!

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 the long-running modding practice of rolling back rosters to the previous season.

Two of the most exciting modding ideas for basketball video games are bringing an old favourite up to date, and winding back the clock in new games with a detailed retro season mod. There’s something truly enchanting about a mod so comprehensive that you almost forget that several years – or indeed, decades – separate the game and the season that the roster mod is set in! In comparison, roster mods that just involve rolling the rosters back one year may seem like a more humble affair, particularly if they’re completely minimalist and don’t include any court, jersey, or logo updates.

And yet, these projects can be immensely satisfying to create and play with! There are reasons that for as long as we’ve been able to meaningfully customise rosters – with or without the aid of external tools – we’ve had the idea of rolling back a game’s rosters to the previous campaign. In short, it’s a combination of some of our favourite aspects of playing and modding basketball video games, to the point where a season needn’t be particularly old or established as nostalgic for us to want to re-create it. It’s a way of changing things up, so let’s look at a popular way to go back, that goes way back!

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #544 of the NLSC Podcast!

You know what really grinds our gears? This week, we take a page out of Peter Griffin’s book, and discuss a few things that are really bugging us. That includes Anthony Edwards’ ridiculous comments about players being unskilled in bygone eras, some incredibly and unnecessarily hostile comments on social media, and content creators who seem to be following a script in order to become super shills. We also join the community in reacting to pre-release NBA 2K25 gameplay footage, and reflect on how it has impacted our excitement for the game. We’ve also got a few thoughts about The City in the wake of the latest Courtside Report, and finish up with a recap of a session revisiting NBA Live 2003.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:25:17 — 58.9MB)

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!

In our most recent Parsec sessions, Dee and I turned back the clock to 2003 in a couple of different ways! As you’ll see from the latest highlights uploaded to the NLSC YouTube channel, we connected to play the GameCube version of NBA Live 2003, and NBA 2K17 PC using Dee’s Ultimate Classic Teams Roster.

The NBA Live 2003 game – which we’ll be discussing in this week’s NLSC Podcast – saw us take on the San Antonio Spurs with the Minnesota Timberwolves. Whenever you flash back to that era, it’s difficult to pass up the opportunity to play out an epic battle of big men, namely Tim Duncan vs. Kevin Garnett. It wasn’t just KG and TD putting on a show though, as David Robinson, Steve Smith, Wally Szczerbiak, Anthony Peeler, and other notable names all contributed highlights.

Dee put together a fantastic project in the Ultimate Classic Teams Roster, and it allowed us to play an extremely authentic 2003 season showdown in NBA 2K17, jam-packed with highlights. We took on Steve Francis, rookie Yao Ming, and the Houston Rockets with an Orlando Magic squad featuring Tracy McGrady, Grant Hill, and an aging Shawn Kemp. The game opened with a jaw-dropping poster from T-Mac, and the great plays just kept on coming after that!

Check out the highlights of these 2003 season matchups in two different games – one from the season in question, one more recent and modded to include those teams – below! As always, be sure to subscribe to our channel for more basketball gaming content, and feel free to hit us up with any suggestions of games you’d like to see us play.

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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 thoughts on the annual honeymoon phase that accompanies the release of every NBA 2K game.

NBA 2K25 will be out this Friday – or Wednesday, if you’ve pre-ordered for the Early Tip-Off – which means it won’t be long before we get our hands on this year’s release. It’s always an exciting time, as the community prepares for another year of basketball gaming. All of those offseason moves that created intriguing new lineups? We’ll get to see how they fare on the virtual hardwood! Although they’re the cause of the New Game Blues, the fresh start and clean slate in MyTEAM and MyCAREER can also be enticing, especially with the prospect of more content to come.

And of course, we’re eager to see whether all of the improvements that were hyped up during the preview season are as good as advertised. We shouldn’t expect perfection; beyond being an impossible standard in general, any Triple-A game that’s developed in the space of a year is going to have a bug or two. Even with all the pre-release QA testing, there are going to be glitches or gameplay quirks that aren’t discovered until a game is in the hands of the masses. It’s important to remember that, but at the same time, we shouldn’t ever pretend that everything’s perfect, and refuse to criticise a new game. Too many people forget this during the annual honeymoon phase for NBA 2K.

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As another week here at the NLSC draws to a close, I’d like to spotlight a couple of recent uploads to our YouTube channel! In case you haven’t seen them yet – or indeed, if you’d like to watch them again, we won’t mind! – Dee has uploaded some retro NBA 2K19 highlights, while I’ve done the same for NBA 2K8.

More specifically, Dee’s video showcases the 1986 roster mod from Stildo33 and company, as he takes control of the Portland Trail Blazers with a young Clyde Drexler and faces his brother who is using the Philadelphia 76ers with veterans Julius Erving and Moses Malone, and a young Charles Barkley. It was an exciting game with a wild finish, and it’s a great demonstration of a fantastic retro roster mod.

As I noted in this week’s Wayback Wednesday, I didn’t retroactively become a big fan of NBA 2K8 after revisiting it, but the game definitely has its moments. To that end, I’ve put together a compilation of the best plays from a couple of games I played against the CPU, taking on the 80s East with the 80s West, and the 90s West with the 90s East.

Check out those retro highlights from NBA 2K19 and NBA 2K8 below! As always, be sure to subscribe to our channel if you haven’t already, and feel free to hit us up with any suggestions of games that you’d like to see us play. We’ll do our best to get them into the rotation, and share the highlights with you!

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Get ready for more fantastic highlights from the basketball gaming community in the NLSC Top 10 Plays of the Week, curated by Dee4Three! New and old games alike are featured in this celebration of spectacular moments on the virtual hardwood. To submit your clips, post them in this topic, or hit up Dee on Twitter.

Being a huge Michael Jordan fan, I always enjoy seeing his virtual counterpart in the NLSC Top 10 Plays. To that end, this week’s countdown features two appearances from His Airness, including a signature layup in NBA 2K16, and a dunk on the break that also showcases NBA Live 2000 PC with maxed-out textures. There are also streetball moves in NBA 2K7, tremendous arcade action in NBA Showtime: NBA on NBC, and another assortment of awesome poster dunks from a variety of games. It’s time to get hyped for a weekend of basketball gaming, so let’s get to the action!

What was your favourite highlight this week? Sound off in the comments below, and once again, get in on the fun by sending us your best plays! Remember, as long as it’s a basketball game, it’s eligible for the countdown. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to us on YouTube for more basketball gaming videos.

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 jams that you’d expect to see in a dunk contest that could be readily performed during gameplay in sim games.

Sim basketball games have always taken a more casual approach to realism when it comes to dunks. In the earliest NBA Live games, the flashiest dunks included 540 degree reverse jams, which could be pulled off by any player with a suitably high dunking rating. Even as dunks became more realistic over the years, players would still throw it down far more often than in real life. I’d argue that this is an acceptable break from reality, as it adds more excitement to the gameplay. A real game may only see a handful of dunks, but that’s not as fun on the virtual hardwood!

Nevertheless, while the ratio of dunks to layups and other inside shots may continue to take a more casual approach to realism, the jams themselves are ones that we’d expect to see during the course of an NBA game. With the introduction of animation packages, we’re well past the days where anyone with an above average rating could 360 and 540 in traffic. However, there are sim games that have allowed players to perform dunk contest jams during regular gameplay, and some of those releases are more recent than you might think. With that being said, here are five jams worthy of the dunk contest that we’ve been able to throw down in otherwise sim gameplay.

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With NBA 2K25 dropping next week, the latest Courtside Report provides an insight into what to expect from The City. For anyone who is unaware, The City is the open world hub of MyCAREER that was introduced in NBA 2K21 New Gen, expanding on the concept of The Neighborhood.

As someone who has been critical of The City in the past, it does appear that NBA 2K25 has made a couple of improvements based on gamer feedback. As previously mentioned in the MyCAREER Courtside Report, MyCOURT is making a welcome return. The City has also been condensed, with fewer buildings that serve no purpose.

The connected modes also feature ranked and unranked areas, with overhauled aesthetics. Classic parks will return as part of Seasonal events, and there are new stomping grounds for the Rise and Elite park affiliations. A squad finder has been added, the Streetball sidequest returns, and the Rep system is also back.

That’s just a brief overview, as I’ve summarised the key points from the NBA 2K25 Courtside Report on The City below. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and jump into the discussion here in the Forum!

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NBA Live 2005 may be turning twenty years old very soon, but we’re still seeing mod releases for it here and there, which is awesome! To that end, Lo55yboy has released a new 2025 season roster update, featuring the Class of 2024 Draftees and other offseason moves. Check it out at the link below!

Lo55yboy
2024/25 Roster

Thanks to everyone who continues to contribute to our Downloads database! If you need help uploading files, be sure to check out this video tutorial. For more information about downloads, the modding community, and Mod Releases bulletins, please see this FAQ in our Wiki.

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 Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 version of NBA 2K8.

The tagline of NBA 2K8 was “It’s like that”. I find it extremely appropriate, though I guarantee it isn’t for the reasons that the marketing department at Take-Two intended. Instead, “it’s like that” are the frustrated words that run through my mind whenever I give NBA 2K8 a chance, and it disappoints me once again. Not to spoil the entire retrospective before I get into it, but if NBA 2K6 or NBA 2K7 had been the games to get me into the NBA 2K series – and they may well might’ve been, had I given them a fair chance back in the day – NBA 2K8 could’ve turned me off of it again.

Indeed, I’m prepared to call it one of the most overrated games in the entire series. The only reason I hesitate is because after looking at some contemporary reviews, it seems that the criticisms and unfavourable comparisons to its predecessors were being made back then, too. GameTrailers’ review even went so far as to call it a serious step backwards, and I’m inclined to agree. It’s unfortunate because the game does have a lot of good bones and enticing features, but for me, it’s been a major retro basketball gaming disappointment. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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