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 finding basketball gaming’s answer to Tecmo Super Bowl.
Tecmo Super Bowl is undoubtedly an iconic video game. Fully-licensed NFL teams and players, well-designed gameplay, stat tracking, and the dominance of virtual Bo Jackson, all helped cement it as a legendary release. That legend has only grown over time, thanks to emulation facilitating a modding scene that has kept the game dutifully updated and enthusiastically played right through to today. When it comes to a cult following in the retro gaming and modding scene, Tecmo Super Bowl is right up there with the original Doom games.
Basketball is my sport however, so I’m left wondering: is there an equivalent retro hoops title to Tecmo Super Bowl? For that matter, could there be? Obviously, there are a handful of old favourites still being updated, but these days those titles rarely approach the same vintage as Tecmo Super Bowl. It stands to reason. It could be argued that sim basketball games that hold up decades later didn’t come along until the mid 90s, or even the mid 2000s. Once they evolved to that point, we ended up with several great releases that remained moddable and playable years later. With that in mind, which titles could potentially be basketball gaming’s Tecmo Super Bowl?
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 of the best parts of the NLSC Top 10 Plays is that it’s a weekly reminder that older hoops titles needn’t be forgotten. People in the community are currently meeting up weekly to play NBA Hangtime, and those sessions have delivered another exciting alley-oop for the countdown. Elsewhere, NBA Live 19’s servers may be gone, but the spectacular moments live on. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, as five different basketball video games are featured in this week’s array of poster dunks, two-way plays, and other great virtual hardwood highlights. 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 inaccuracies regarding the All-Stars in various basketball video games.
Another All-Star Game will be upon us next week. I admit that I highly doubt I’ll be watching it. What was once a spectacular exhibition of the best players in the NBA competing in the ultimate pick-up game has turned into a boring display that we can’t even call basketball. From the lack of effort by a spoiled generation of players to ridiculous formats under the tournament-obsessed Adam Silver, the All-Star Game absolutely stinks now. It’s a damn shame, as its spits on the legacy of all the great players who paved the way for today’s “stars” to get paid $40 million to load-manage.
Whoops, I went full Grumpy Old Man there! It is tough not to grumble though, as the All-Star Game used to be something I really enjoyed. Sadly, over the past decade or so, it’s completely lost its appeal and competitive spirit. I still have fond memories of what the event used to be of course, and that also carries over to the virtual hardwood. Over the years, it’s been a blast to play with the All-Star teams in games, as well as the Rookie Challenge/Rising Stars squads when they’re available. As with many other aspects of basketball video game rosters though, the virtual All-Star teams have had some rather weird and interesting inaccuracies. Here are five that I’ve encountered!
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.
It’s easy to just default to dunks as the definitive highlight in basketball, real or virtual. However, as the variety in this week’s NLSC Top 10 Plays demonstrates, we see all kinds of spectacular moments in hoops! We’re ending January with a bang as poster dunks are joined by self alley-oops, ankle-breakers, a heave from midcourt, and game-winning shots. Some cool mods are also on display, including retro NBA rosters and classic NCAA teams. These plays from NBA 2K14, NBA 2K16, and NBA 2K26 are ready to get you 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 improvements in basketball video games that I believe are somewhat underappreciated.
Basketball video games have come a long way, in ways that are extremely obvious. Technological improvements have allowed them to look more realistic, include more modes, content, and features, and generally achieve more accuracy throughout the years. However, the little things do matter, and often go a long way in making games more enjoyable. Of course, sometimes the big improvements are underappreciated as well, particularly if we focus on their potential drawbacks rather than how they’ve benefitted the genre.
If nothing else, some milestone improvements are underappreciated because they’ve been a part of basketball video games for so long, leading us to simply expect to see them and thus take them for granted. As such, I’d like to spotlight five improvements that I believe are underappreciated these days. Sure, they’ve become standard features so they’re not necessarily exciting anymore, and it’s not as though we need to grovel in gratitude. Nevertheless, they still deserve recognition for improving the games and pushing them forward. As someone who has been playing basketball games since the 90s, I’d suggest that these five improvements are among the most underappreciated.
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.
There’s never a dull moment when it comes to the NLSC Top 10 Plays, but it’s always special when something rare and unique happens on the virtual hardwood. That certainly describes the #1 play this week, a sequence that gives a whole new meaning to the term “lucky bounce”! The rest of the countdown brings the goods too, as you’ll find the usual assortment of exciting dunks, flashy passes, and other smooth moves that leave defenders in the dust. Five different games are featured this time around, from NBA Live 95 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 realistic moments that are difficult to satisfactorily represent in basketball video games.
It’s stating the obvious, but we want to see realism in sim basketball games. Or do we? For many years, gamers enjoyed seeing NBA Live and later NBA 2K becoming deeper and more realistic virtual basketball experiences, but there has been some backlash in recent years. A vocal contingent of gamers – especially those in the online scene – have expressed a desire to see NBA 2K implement mechanics that are more about reflexes and competitive stick skills than realism. The word “arcade” is often used here, though I’d suggest it’s really more about a casual approach to sim.
Of course, it’s not just competitive online gamers and more casual hoops gamers who have quibbles with realistic moments in sim titles. Even dedicated simheads that are keen on seeing as much realism as possible have come to realise that this also means results that aren’t necessarily desirable. I speak from experience here! From outcomes that defy our expectations as gamers, to the concept of reality at times being stranger than fiction, it can be difficult for sim games to represent realistic moments in a way that’s satisfying and enjoyable. It’s a challenge for developers, and as these examples demonstrate, sometimes a few understandable breaks from reality may be in order.
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 Kobe Bryant’s 81-point game, ahead of its 20th anniversary.
Tomorrow marks 20 years since Kobe Bryant torched the Toronto Raptors with an 81-point outburst, setting a new mark for the second-highest points scored in an NBA game. It always sounds cliché when we talk about how the years seem to fly by after we’ve taken a few more trips around the sun, but it’s absolutely true! Our perception of time undoubtedly changes. When Kobe dropped 81 on January 22nd 2006, I was only 21, so 20 years felt like a long time to me; basically a lifetime, in fact! Things that happened 20 years before that – or 20 years before I was even born – felt ancient.
For example, 20 years before Kobe had his 81-point game, Larry Bird and the Celtics were the 1986 Champions. To me, that felt like something from another time. And yet, because I remember it, Kobe’s 81-point game feels contemporary despite it being as old today as the Celtics’ 1986 title was in 2006! Again, it doesn’t feel like it’s been 20 years; or perhaps more accurately, 20 years doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t feel like eight years since I last reflected on Kobe’s big game, or indeed, six since his tragic passing. As that game is turning 20 though, 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 challenging it can be to accurately rate a fading star in basketball video games.
Since they became a visible part of basketball video games, player ratings have been a contentious issue. We’ve rarely been completely happy with the ratings in the official rosters, sometimes for very good reasons; particularly when it comes to the historical players! Developers have also shared stories about players arguing about their ratings when they come in for motion capture or face scans. On a lighter note, when Hassan Whiteside returned to the NBA for the 2015 season and began turning in some good performances for the Heat, he joked about doing it to get his NBA 2K ratings up.
As someone who used to maintain current roster updates for NBA Live on PC, there were certainly ratings in the default rosters that I disagreed with. At the same time, I also sympathised with the producers who were responsible for those official rosters, because it’s impossible to please everyone. We all have different views on how certain players should be rated – with bias often being a factor – as well as how player ratings should be handled across the board. All roster makers end up settling on a system of some kind, me included. Even so, some players have proved particularly challenging to rate over the years, and a fading star will generally be among the most difficult.
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.
A wild alley-oop from our NBA 2K9 Association, a re-creation of one of the top dunks of the 1998 season in ESPN NBA 2Night 2002, and a modded-in Anthony Edwards doing his best Spider-Man impression in NBA 2K16. That’s just a small sample of the spectacular moments you’ll find in this week’s NLSC Top 10 Plays! A total of six different basketball video games are providing poster dunks, ankle-breakers, big swats, and more, in another countdown that signals it’s time to hit 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 useful hacks we’ve been able to utilise in basketball video games.
Although “hacks” and “hacking” are terms that have come to be associated with acts that are malicious or unscrupulous uses of technology, they also refer to inelegant yet quick, creative, and effective solutions in programming. Indeed, Al Lowe – the creator of Leisure Suit Larry – described the method of using one background picture and four mostly transparent cells to create the bamboo maze in Leisure Suit Larry 3 as being his favourite hack. Ironically, this means that while many people disdain the term “life hacks”, it’s actually using “hack” in a similar context to software development!
To that point, modding involves hacks; not just the process of breaking into the game files and altering them, but cobbling together solutions utilising functionality that was intended for developer use, or in a way that was otherwise unintended. This list of the most useful hacks in basketball video games is a mixture of values we discovered we could change to mod or unlock content, and hidden or unadvertised functionality that we can make use of. To that end, we could certainly debate as to whether all of them strictly qualify as hacks, but there’s no doubt that they were useful! And so, without any further ado, here are five ways that we’ve been able to cleverly tinker with games.
From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #614 of the NLSC Podcast!
Who are the most dominant players when they’re controlled by the CPU in basketball video games? This week, we join the community in discussing some of the most unguardable players that we’ve encountered on the virtual hardwood over the years, at least when they’re in the hands of the AI. Whether it’s an issue with the engine, or their ratings are slightly overdone or completely inaccurate, these stars and role players alike have given us fits on the sticks. We also reflect on the frustration of not always being able to light it up with those same players ourselves, and mention a few players who haven’t been as dominant in video games they really should be.
Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:03:25 — 43.9MB)
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!
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 nostalgia is something special that we’re lucky to have, rather than being sad and pitiable.
Nostalgia has been getting a bad rap for quite a while now. Oh sure, there’s plenty of nostalgic communities and content online, as many of us love to reminisce. However, there has undoubtedly been a noticeable backlash to nostalgia as online demographics have shifted over the past decade or so. Beyond tired arguments about what was better – then or now – the discourse has been polluted by smug armchair psychoanalysis. If you’re nostalgic, or prefer to stick with something older, you must be hung up on the past, miserably chasing a moment in time that you’ll never get back.
Now, I can’t say that that doesn’t hold true for some people, though I’ll say it with far more sympathy and understanding than those who want to dump on the past to prop up the present! For many of us though, continuing to enjoy the classics – or at least looking back on them fondly – is neither depressing, nor preventing us from having new experiences. And so, the idea that nostalgia is a sad, delusional cry for help is infuriatingly condescending. Frankly, if we’ve made fond memories with our interests and passions that we can enthusiastically recall, then we’re extremely fortunate. If those things can still bring us joy, we’re even luckier. There’s nothing sad about that.
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.
The NLSC Top 10 Plays is back to its regular timeslot this week, ready to fire you up for a weekend on the virtual hardwood! I’d suggest it’ll be impossible not to jump on the sticks after watching this jaw-dropping array of aerial wizardry, slick passes, incredible ankle-breakers, and another wild game-winning shot. Three different basketball games are featured in the countdown, namely NBA 2K14, NBA Live 19, and NBA 2K26. While the rotation may be shorter this week, everyone is clearly having a blast with their game of choice. 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 interactive areas that were featured in basketball video games before The Neighborhood (and The City).
I don’t enjoy feeling cynical about basketball video games, or any of my hobbies and interests for that matter. Some might argue that cynicism and experience go hand-in-hand – there’s a scene from the old Dilbert animated series that suggests as such – but I’d like to think that we’re not doomed to become Debbie Downers about our favourite things! With that being said, it’s impossible not to notice when game design is lacking in goodwill and incorporating greedy recurrent revenue mechanics, or is frustrating and problematic in some other way.
It’s why I’ve always had my reservations about The Neighborhood (and subsequently The City) in MyCAREER. In some ways it’s interesting and immersive to have an open world to explore, but as I’ve explained, it’s not necessarily a good fit for the genre. More to the point, once you look beyond the creativity of the concept, you can see how it pushes advertising and recurrent revenue mechanics on gamers, while also padding out playtime. It’s a shame that it’s so cynically corporate, because there was a time when interactive areas in basketball games were a fun idea. To that end, here are five interactive areas that preceded The Neighborhood that were definitely cool to see.
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