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 bad omens in basketball gaming.
I don’t believe in omens as a mystical force in the universe. However, I do believe that there are warning signs that we should take notice of, which I’ll colloquially refer to as bad omens. As far as basketball gaming is concerned, there are definitely some bad omens when it comes to an upcoming release, or the future of a series. They’re not exactly mysterious and hard to spot, but it obviously gets easier with experience. We can recognise patterns, acknowledge precedent, and employ some common sense. At the same time, it’s easy to ignore bad omens.
After all, many of us try to remain optimistic about our hobby. We don’t want to jump the gun and assume the worst, especially if our predictions and pessimism have been proven wrong in the past. Things that have seemed like bad omens have turned out to be meaningless, or in rare cases, good news. Still, it pays to err on the side of caution, and there are warning signs that we should probably brace ourselves for bad news; or at the very least, temper our expectations. Once again, experience can usually guide us, as the red flags are much easier to spot after you’ve been through a few preview seasons. To that end, when one of these five events occurs, it tends to be a bad omen.
From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #622 of the NLSC Podcast!
There’s a lot of fun to be had taking on the CPU solo or co-operatively in basketball video games, especially with the range of modes at our disposal. However, head-to-head play is also a blast, and we have countless memories of epic battles with friends, family, and online opponents. This week, we join the community in recalling the best players that we’ve ever faced on the virtual hardwood, and some of the lessons that we took from those showdowns. We also recap a fun game of NBA Live 2000 PC that demonstrated just how superbly it holds up more than 25 years later, and touch on some of the downsides of skill-based mechanics when it comes to realism and lucky plays.
Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 54:12 — 37.6MB)
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!
Get ready for more fantastic highlights from the basketball gaming community in the NLSC Top 10 Plays of the Week, curated by Dee! 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, send Dee a message, or hit him up on X.
Once again, we love variety in the NLSC Top 10 Plays, but we’ll never object to a reel of spectacular dunks! The most exciting shot in basketball is the star of this week’s countdown, which includes a flurry of awesome jams from Kevin Garnett and Antonio McDyess in a battle between the Live 01 Legends. In fact, Legends are also a recurring motif this week, from the All-Time College Teams in NBA 2K17 to the greats of the game hooping together in Ultimate Team and MyNBA. The countdown culminates with one of the craziest alley-oops you’ll ever see on the virtual hardwood, courtesy of two of the greatest players of all-time. 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 weird roster glitches that I’ve encountered in basketball video games over the years.
The harsh reality of video game design is that no release is ever going to be absolutely perfect. Of course, absolute perfection is an impossible goal in just about any creative endeavour, and you’ll also never be able to please everyone with your design choices. On top of that, bugs are basically inevitable. They were present in classic games, and we certainly see them in modern titles. Whether it’s Super Mario Bros. 3, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, or NBA 2K26, it’s just not feasible to code a game that has absolutely no technical issues or imperfections.
Ideally, bugs and glitches will be rare, or have minimal impact on the experience. The best video games – basketball or otherwise – tend to be extremely stable for the most part. There have been some frustrating bugs in basketball video games over the years though, including glitches related to roster editing. They can be particularly nasty, causing us to lose saved data and in turn countless hours of work customising a game. As someone who has enjoyed tinkering with games and creating roster mods since the 90s, I’ve encountered several weird glitches and badly-designed editing functions. These five are among the strangest and most annoying that I’ve experienced to date.
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 pondering another historical NBA What If, specifically what if Wilt Chamberlain made a comeback in the 80s?
Monday marked 64 years since Wilt Chamberlain scored a record 100 points as his Philadelphia Warriors defeated the New York Knicks 169-147. As a young basketball fan in the 90s eager to learn about the history of the game, that iconic performance seemed so long ago. After all, it happened 22 years before I was even born! To that point of course, now that I’ve witnessed and am nostalgic for events in NBA history that happened upwards of 30 years ago, it’s certainly changed my perspective of time. Nevertheless, to me Wilt Chamberlain will always be from a bygone era.
However, Wilt Chamberlain playing in the NBA came very close to feeling like more of a modern event from the perspective of a 90s kid. Even though many stars of the 80s had retired before I got into basketball, their careers intersected with the all-time greats that I grew up watching, such as Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, Charles Barkley, and so on. They were frequently spotlighted in the NBA home videos that I watched, so in a way they still felt contemporary. The same could’ve been true of Wilt Chamberlain, had he made a comeback in the 80s. Let’s take a look back…way back…
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 how “press steal to foul” is a lazy approach to designing defensive mechanics in basketball video games.
There’s a clear interest in and emphasis on skill-based mechanics in NBA 2K these days. From sweats in the online scene sneering “get good” to developer blogs touting a focus on representing the “skill gap”, there’s a belief that NBA 2K’s gameplay must be a worthy test of one’s reflexes and abilities on the sticks. Accessibility? Realism? Fun? Go play a mobile puzzle game if that’s what you want, you filthy casual! That’s the attitude that NBA 2K has been increasingly catering to, and gameplay has taken a dip in quality because of it. At least one game developer saw that coming.
The irony of course is that thanks to canned and animation-heavy sequences, to say nothing of artificial boosts, imbalance, and paying to skip the grind, it’s laughable to suggest that NBA 2K is a pure test of stick skills! Moreover, when the mechanics are broken or poorly designed, it becomes a test of a gamer’s patience and willingness to compensate for a flawed system, rather than their ability to be strategic and skilful. Like a carpenter with a dull saw and a headless hammer, we’re impeded by the tools we have at our disposal. In short, we need a game’s mechanics to work and be useful in order to expertly employ them. To that end, “press steal to foul” is lazy design.
Get ready for more fantastic highlights from the basketball gaming community in the NLSC Top 10 Plays of the Week, curated by Dee! 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, send Dee a message, or hit him up on X.
Although we’ll never complain about a countdown packed with dunks, we love to see variety in the NLSC Top 10 Plays! In addition to some spectacular slams, this week brings us flashy trick shots, great defensive plays leading to fast break buckets, fantastic alley-oops, and another ice-cold gamewinner. Seven different titles are on display this week ranging from NBA Live 2004 right through to NBA 2K26, and you’ll also see some excellent mods being enjoyed. Ready to get hyped for another weekend on the virtual hardwood? 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 unexpected benefits of basketball video games.
Like most devotees of the virtual hardwood, I got into basketball games because they combine two things that I enjoy; obviously, video games and basketball! To that end, the main benefit of basketball games has been countless hours of fun playing a virtual representation of my favourite sport. When I was a kid getting into hoops back in the 90s, basketball games helped to educate me about the NBA, and become familiar with some lesser-known players. They’ve allowed me to re-create iconic moments, indulge fantasies, play out What If scenarios, and basically just have more fun with basketball.
You can’t really ask for more than that out of one of your favourite hobbies! However, there have been some other, more unexpected benefits of basketball games. I couldn’t have ever imagined those benefits when I was excitedly installing NBA Live 96 and NBA Jam Tournament Edition on the family PC and renting NBA Live 95 for Super Nintendo from the video store all those years ago. While basketball games would’ve remained an enjoyable pastime for me even without these unexpected benefits, they certainly make me grateful that I took and maintained an interest in them! Indeed, I’m sure that basketball games have given many of us more than just fun on the sticks.
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 whether a franchise mode game can ever truly be failed.
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: completion is what we make it in basketball video games. There are also different reasons to play video games in general, with completion being but one of them. For example, our NLSC THRILLHO squad played over 500 games of 2K Pro-Am in NBA 2K17. We didn’t win any tournaments, snare any prizes for a top ranking, or reach a definitive end point. However, we were having so much fun that we kept meeting up to play all those games, and in doing so, created many fond memories. Competition and camaraderie were the point, not completion.
Traditional NBA season play, whether in the form of a single season, franchise, or career mode, is obviously a little different. Sure, it’s also about competing and having fun along the way, but the format provides a long-term goal: finish at least one season and ideally cap it off with a championship. Franchise modes have also grown deeper over the years, inviting us to customise the experience to our liking and take on more responsibilities. It’s all too easy to get impatient and bored during a long season, or find that setting up the board was more fun than playing the game. Completion is what we make it, but even so, is it ever fair to say that a franchise game has “failed”?
Get ready for more fantastic highlights from the basketball gaming community in the NLSC Top 10 Plays of the Week, curated by Dee! 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, send Dee a message, or hit him up on X.
One thing’s for sure: the slams you’ll find in this week’s NLSC Top 10 Plays are far more exciting than the 2026 Dunk Contest! Sure, that’s a low bar to clear, but the community soars far above it with some spectacular jams on the virtual hardwood. It’s not often that you’ll see NBA Live 07 for Xbox 360 in the countdown, but even it was able to put this year’s contest to shame with some wild stuff from Tyrus Thomas! However, the top spot goes to another clutch bucket from a gamer with a knack for crazy finishes. Seven different games are featured this time around, from NBA Live 2003 through to NBA Bounce. 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 provides five more corrections to errors in previous articles.
It’s been a while since I last issued some corrections to errors I’ve made in previous articles, so that must mean I’ve been completely accurate since then! Well, possibly not, though once again going back and correcting my mistakes a couple of times now has encouraged me to be more thorough with my research and fact-checking. I’d like to think that I’ve been successful in those efforts, though when you are your own editor and fact-checker, you’re definitely at risk of oversight! Whenever that happens, the best that you can do is to be transparent and provide the necessary corrections.
Obviously, that includes editing the original articles and adding the relevant footnotes, which I recently did for my NBA Jam 99 retrospective. However, I also believe that there’s value in spotlighting my mistakes like this. It feels even more transparent, as edits to the original articles can go unread. Additionally, it gives me the opportunity to dive back into those topics with the accuracy I wish I’d had the first time around, and share some interesting stories and trivia. I’d also prefer to be someone who can admit when they’re wrong and learn from their mistakes, rather than just double-down out of foolish pride. To that end, here are five more errors in my articles that I must correct!
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 pondering another historical NBA What If, specifically what if Charles Barkley was traded to the Lakers in 1992?
When I think of Charles Barkley, I generally picture him in the Phoenix Suns’ iconic sunburst uniforms of the 90s. After all, that’s where he was playing when I started taking a keener interest in basketball. Hoop heads who have been watching longer than I have may well picture him on the Philadelphia 76ers instead, and indeed that stint accounts for half of his career. With that being said, it wouldn’t surprise me if the MVP and NBA Finals appearance in 1993 has led to those fans likewise coming to associate Chuck with the Suns more than the 76ers (or the Houston Rockets).
Of course, had a proposed trade gone through in 1992, it seems a safe bet to say that we’d have never seen Sir Charles in a Suns or Rockets uniform. For a brief moment, Charles Barkley was set to join the Los Angeles Lakers, before the deal went up in smoke. As with any What If involving legendary players, it’s fascinating trying to imagine an alternate history and all of the possible ripple effects. It’s all speculation at the end of the day, but Charles Barkley going to the Lakers is undoubtedly a huge What If, in real life and on the virtual hardwood. Let’s take a look back…way back…
From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #619 of the NLSC Podcast!
It’s Michael Jordan’s 63rd Birthday, so we’re taking the opportunity to have an in-depth discussion about His Airness! This includes listing some of his biggest accomplishments, and recalling our favourite memories of watching him with both the Chicago Bulls and Washington Wizards. We also discuss MJ’s interesting history in video games, as despite a common reputation of never appearing on the virtual hardwood, he was in fact a fixture of early releases. Of course, we also have to touch on modding him into so many later titles! We also read out some of the community’s favourite real life and video game memories of Michael Jordan, and unsurprisingly, there are some familiar stories!
Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:02:48 — 43.5MB)
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!
Get ready for more fantastic highlights from the basketball gaming community in the NLSC Top 10 Plays of the Week, curated by Dee! 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, send Dee a message, or hit him up on X.
Today is Valentine’s Day, and this week’s NLSC Top 10 Plays is undoubtedly a love letter to basketball! Granted, we usually don’t like to think of rejection on Valentine’s Day, but on the court it sets up spectacular two-way plays like the ones you’ll find in the latest countdown. NBA players are also getting fancy on the blacktop, some great mods are on display, and of course, the rim is getting rocked. Eight different games are featured this time around, from NBA Live 2000 all the way through to NBA 2K26. 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 superstitions that many of us may have succumbed to while basketball gaming.
Video games and sports are interests that invite a lot of superstitions, so it’s hardly surprising that there are superstitions surrounding basketball gaming! While I don’t consider myself a particularly superstitious person, I’ll admit that there are times when I’ve engaged in unusual and illogical rituals under the pretence that they’ll somehow have an impact on the virtual hardwood, or indeed a real game being played on the other side of the world. It’s silly, I know that it’s silly, and even when a superstitious ritual “works”, I’m well aware that it wasn’t actually a factor!
Besides, while superstitions may imply a belief in supernatural forces, there’s also a psychological explanation for them. They can provide us with a sense of control, which is comforting in situations we can’t influence. There’s also evidence that lucky charms and rituals boost confidence. Free throw routines and favourite jersey numbers are good examples of this. It only makes sense that this psychology also applies to basketball gaming, with superstitions both soothing us and pumping us up when we face challenges, from technical issues to moments that test our stick skills. Therefore, there may actually be some merit to a few of these basketball gaming superstitions!
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