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 five drawbacks of awesome features that tend to be overlooked.
Even though I’m an advocate for deep and detailed critique, I would agree that it’s possible to veer too far into the realm of nitpicking. That doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to criticise minor annoyances, but perfection is an unrealistic standard. However, I don’t think it’s unfair to point out that some of the most awesome features we’ve seen in basketball video games have had drawbacks that we’ve overlooked. They may not be immediately apparent or a problem for everybody, but they are issues that we’ll end up noticing, and may stand out as weaknesses in aspects that we otherwise really like.
Again, despite the title that I’ve used for this article, I don’t want to come across too negatively here. After all, something we can take away from each of these examples is that the drawbacks in question didn’t prevent the features from being awesome! They are drawbacks nevertheless though, and it’s important to be able to recognise that even our favourite modes and features aren’t perfect. It’s how we constructively criticise games, and suggest ways that the experiences we enjoy can become even better. With that being said, here are five drawbacks that ultimately didn’t prevent features from being awesome, but still caused some frustration or held them back in some way.