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 basketball video games that had the wrong vibe about them.
I wouldn’t blame you if you’re looking at this week’s topic and thinking that I’ve lost my mind, talking about a basketball game having the wrong kind of “vibe”. What kind of a metric is that? Allow me to explain myself, as I think many of you will actually be able to relate. I’m sure that at some point, we’ve all eagerly picked up a new hoops title, only to feel disappointed in it. However, that disappointment goes beyond our complaints about gameplay, modes, graphics, animations, and so on. Something about the game just feels…off. Some problems may be more conceptual than technical.
As such, this can be a very personal reaction, and thus highly subjective. Furthermore, although it’s more common for games with a lot of issues to have the wrong vibe, it can also happen with titles that are generally considered to be good, if something about them just doesn’t gel with you. To that end, while I expect I’m not alone on a couple of the examples I’m sharing here, I suspect that not everyone will agree with all of them. That’s fine; as I said, it’s highly subjective, and I’d be interested to hear other examples from my fellow basketball gamers. With that being said, for one reason or another, these five games just didn’t have the right vibe for me.
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