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.
As we discussed in Episode #565 of the NLSC Podcast, the NBA was packed with stars and talent in the 2000s. This week’s NLSC Top 10 Plays provides some entertaining reminders of that, as big names of the New Millennium such as Kobe Bryant, Vince Carter, and Tracy McGrady are all soaring to the rim for authoritative slams. You’ll also see one of the best lobs that NBA Live 10 can produce, and Virtual Hardwood Legend Terry Hanson. Seven games are featured this week, so without any further ado, 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 real events that I wish had happened during the course of my NBA 2K14 MyCAREER.
My offline MyCAREER in NBA 2K14 continues to be a blast. I’m sure that much is obvious from the fact that I’m in my sixth season, to say nothing of how often I’ve talked about it in articles and on our podcast! In any case, it’s been a fun ride so far, and I’m eager to continue the journey. For the most part, there isn’t much that I’d change. Sure, it’s unfortunate that my bid to go 82-0 was thwarted once again in Year 6, but the elusiveness of that goal is now part of the story. As much as I like realism, the unlikely results and fictional moves have made my virtual career enjoyable.
Of course, it’s also been entertaining to see my game mimic real life in unexpected ways, such as LeBron James joining the Los Angeles Lakers (albeit much earlier in this case). This combination of real life and fiction forms the alternate realities that make multi-season play in career and franchise modes so fun and rewarding. All the same, I’d be lying if I said there weren’t any real events that I would’ve liked to have seen come to pass in my NBA 2K14 MyCAREER. Again, I do enjoy the fictional and unusual outcomes as well, but both the on-court experience and the narrative of my NBA 2K14 MyCAREER would’ve benefitted from reflecting a handful of real events.
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 an in-depth look back at NBA Street Homecourt with a video retrospective.
Eighteen years ago tomorrow, the Xbox 360 version of NBA Street Homecourt was released, with the PlayStation 3 version dropping a couple of weeks later. Featuring authentic courts where NBA players honed their talents growing up, it marked a tonal shift in the series. As such, it’s easily the most divisive NBA Street game! However, while it may not have been a hit with everyone, it definitely has its strong points. I’ve always enjoyed it for what it is, and the fact that I caught an early glimpse of it at an NBA Live 07 community event undoubtedly contributes to my nostalgia for it! This video retrospective is a long time coming, so let’s take a look back…way back…
I hope that you enjoyed this deep dive into the final console release in the NBA Street series! What are your thoughts on NBA Street Homecourt? Is it an overlooked gem, a blunder, or somewhere in between? Have your say in the comments below! I’m keen to produce more video retrospectives for Wayback Wednesday throughout 2025, so be sure to subscribe to the NLSC YouTube channel if you haven’t already. On top of retrospectives, essays, and podcast episodes, you’ll also find the weekly Top 10 Plays and plenty of gameplay reels. As always, feel free to hit us up with any suggestions of games that you’d like to see us play, or be covered in a future Wayback Wednesday.
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 the lines between Triple-A gaming and mobile gaming have well and truly become blurred.
We’re living in the age of hot takes, clickbait, and extreme opinions. With that being said, as much as algorithms may not reward it, I prefer to steer clear of hyperbole and reactionary viewpoints in my content. To that end, if I express a strong and potentially controversial opinion, it’s because I mean it. I don’t want to devalue adjectives, be they positive or negative. If you call every new release the best, or frequently declare games to be garbage without further explanation, then eventually you undermine your credibility. Well, your credibility should be in question, anyway!
Mind you, sometimes harsh, unvarnished criticisms that may seem like hyperbolic insults are in fact fair and accurate. A good example is the assertion that Triple-A games are becoming more and more like mobile titles. There’s plenty of evidence that the suits at major studios have taken notes on mobile gaming’s ability to milk gamers for recurrent revenue, and pushed for those mechanics to be incorporated into console and PC games. As such, it hasn’t gone unnoticed how games like NBA 2K now have features and economies akin to free-to-play titles. Recently, I had an experience that made it clear just how blurred the lines are between Triple-A and mobile gaming.
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 All-Star Weekend is upon us, and while many of us have lost our enthusiasm for the midseason classic in real life, it’s still a blast in video games! A few of the entries in this week’s NLSC Top 10 Plays demonstrate that, as the league’s brightest stars strut their stuff on the virtual hardwood. As always, it’s not just NBA 2K25 that’s in gamers’ rotations, as you’ll see a couple of classic releases among the six titles featured in this week’s countdown. Spectacular dunks, fantastic two-way plays, ankle breakers…you should know what to expect by now, 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 comments that annoy content creators.
Oh, a topic like this always feels risky! It’s impossible not to sound arrogant or ungrateful, blaming the audience instead of looking inwards. Indeed, that’s the kind of attitude that I’ve readily pushed back against when developers have tried to lay blame at the feet of gamers, rather than acknowledge issues in their titles. When it comes to encouraging engagement, there are many ways that content creators can err, from subpar work to how they speak of and to their readers, viewers, and listeners. If you put creative work out into the world, you’re going to run the gamut of responses to it.
Mind you, just as some content creators have a disgracefully disdainful view of their audience – particularly anyone who dares question their opinions – people jumping in the comments can forget that there’s a human being behind what they consume (well, unless it’s AI-generated, but that’s a gripe for another time). While it’s great to receive comments and know that your work is being seen and appreciated, there are definitely some discouraging responses and needlessly unpleasant interactions. You might say that that’s just the risk we take with any creative endeavour, but if I can be frank here today, there are some comments that content creators like me would prefer not to see.
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 a historical What If; namely, what if Karl Malone broke the all-time scoring record?
Welcome to what I hope will be a recurring Wayback Wednesday feature, in which I explore some intriguing NBA What Ifs, illustrated by basketball video games! For a hardcore basketball and history buff, diving into the league’s biggest What Ifs can be just as interesting as reflecting on real events, results, and records. What small change would have a huge impact on NBA history? Which important events that defined the legacies of teams and players are dependent on a particular decision or twist of fate? For want of a nail, what possible butterfly effects can we imagine?
Considering that I remain a huge fan of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, you might think that I’d be inclined to explore a hypothetical involving them. After all, for all of their success during the 90s, there are a couple of What Ifs there! I will get to them at some point as I do have my own opinions to share, but they’re popular NBA What Ifs that have been discussed many times before. As such, for my first What If, I’m imagining a timeline where Karl Malone breaks the all-time scoring record. It’s a once-feasible event that’s hardly discussed now, so 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 cranky thoughts about social media as an Elder Millennial on those platforms.
As an Elder Millennial who has been using the internet since 1997, I’m no stranger to the negativity of cyberspace (do we even call it that, anymore?). It’s been over twenty years since Penny Arcade bestowed The GIFT upon us, succinctly explaining how utterly feral some people get when they’re anonymous. As you can imagine, running a fansite with a forum attached for over two decades has provided first-hand experience with that! My point is that I’m no stranger to the toxicity of the internet, and that the phenomenon has been normalised long before social media in its current form.
And yet, there’s something about social media these days that makes me, an Elder Millennial – or Millennial Prime, as I personally prefer – feel like channelling Grampa Simpson and yelling at some clouds. After all, that is what we’re doing whenever we rage against social media and online toxicity; both in the punny, literal sense of data being stored in the cloud, and the metaphorical sense of a pointless exercise. We all know that people are jerks online. We know that platforms without moderation invite hateful views at worst and unpleasant discourse at best. Still, I believe that the dismal state of social media continues to hit new lows, without many viable alternatives.
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 debuting some fresh pop outs this week, but the community absolutely bringing it with their highlights is certainly nothing new! To that end, expect to see the usual assortment of breathtaking alley-oops, rim-rattling poster dunks, slick passes, merciless blocks, and cold-blooded clutch plays. Seven different games are featured in the countdown this week, ranging from NBA Live 2005 through to NBA 2K25. As always, it’s just what you need to get hyped for a weekend on the virtual hardwood, 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 erroneous ratings that were based on reputation and narratives, rather than accurate analysis.
Creating roster updates for PC releases of NBA Live for so many years has made me critical of, but also sympathetic to, the producers who maintain official rosters. On one hand, I know the importance of accurately rating players and always strived to do my best in that regard, while also relying on the watchful eyes of the community to provide helpful feedback. To that end, I also understand how easy it is to overlook certain ratings when there are over 400 active players to keep track of. Mistakes will slip through, or a much-needed update will be forgotten.
With that being said, there are times when erroneous ratings aren’t actually a matter of oversight, but rather by design. There are a few reasons for this. As Dee has pointed out, a lack of care with copy and paste jobs, and myopic reliance on spreadsheets and formulas, has led to laughable ratings and tendencies. Other times, these erroneous ratings are reputation-based, as an unsubstantiated narrative about a player is accepted as common knowledge. However, it’s not always a bad thing, as a player’s skill may demand ratings that their stats may not, justifying some padding. These five examples represent the good, the bad, and the lazy, of erroneous reputation-based ratings!
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 paying tribute to the iconic T-Meter.
While a solid basketball video game may be able to get away with advanced controls that are complex and even contrived, the basics must be well-designed and easy to use. If shooting is clunky, or jumping on defense is useless, or trying to pass to a teammate standing next to you is somehow a chore, then the game is not mechanically sound! To that point, while free throws aren’t something that will (or at least, should) happen on every possession, they are a part of the sport as the result of infractions, and thus a basic skill that needs to be properly represented in video games.
Of course, just as certain titles have botched other fundamental aspects of basketball, developers have devised some bewilderingly terrible ways of shooting free throws on the virtual hardwood. All too often, they were needlessly complicating what should be a straightforward mechanic in the name of creativity, challenge, or trying to represent a shooting motion. What those games should’ve done – and indeed, some did – was to copy what EA Sports were doing with the T-Meter. Dated as it may seem, it remains one of my favourite mechanics for free throws. 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 the ups and downs of the early stages of MyCAREER.
It’s been an interesting, but at times frustrating, journey for career modes in NBA 2K. As popular as franchise modes became after being introduced in the early 2000s, there was undeniable interest in a similar experience from the perspective of a single player. Being an RPG style of mode, as My Player evolved into MyCAREER, it began to incorporate cinematic stories. These days, many gamers see the traditional/NBA side of MyCAREER as a means to an end; a way to grind and level up their MyPLAYER avatar for the online scene. Of course, others still enjoy the NBA career experience.
Something that has remained fairly constant, however, is that it’s a long way to the top. Sure, the grind is worse now, in no small part because it encourages paying for quicker upgrades, and boosting Take-Two’s recurrent revenue. Even if you’re willing to pay to skip the grind, it costs more than before. I’ve talked about that many times, and that isn’t really what this article is about, but it does bear acknowledging. In any case, while there are issues with pushy microtransactions, and occasionally a story that doesn’t match up with our starting ratings, the early stages of MyCAREER are about a raw prospect’s journey to success. As tough as it is, it can also be quite fun.
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 tipping off February 2025 with a bang! We begin with a great two-way play ending in an and-one finish in the underrated NBA Live 18, and it only gets more spectacular from there! On top of the poster dunks that we always love to see, the countdown culminates with two cold-blooded clutch plays that’ll surely get you pumped to compete on the virtual hardwood this weekend. Five different games are featured this week, from NBA 2K8 through to NBA 2K25. 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 times that we were able to alter the frontend in basketball video games without modding them.
You know, sometimes we focus so much on searching for the video game secrets that we wish were real, that we forget to enjoy the fun things we can actually do. Take Super Mario 64, for example. So many people have painstakingly collected every coin in every level, and done everything else they can to unlock Luigi; an endeavour that’s doomed to fail, because it’s been proven that he’s not in the game. Something that is in the game however is the ability to stretch Mario’s face on the title screen into goofy poses and expressions. Silly as it may be, I’ve laughed uproariously while doing that!
After all, there’s something satisfying about being able to mess around with a game’s presentation or frontend, without actually having to externally mod any files. It may not have a practical use, but it doesn’t need one. It’s still a novelty, something fun to do as you’re preparing to jump into gameplay, or you’ve just finished up a session. I realise that doesn’t gel with the idea of competitive play, grinding for rewards, and taking video games super seriously, but that’s not all that gaming is about. Whether it’s a prominent option that you can select, or a minor detail that you can manipulate, there’s joy in having the ability to alter the frontend in various basketball video games.
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 MyCAREER in NBA 2K15, and the experimental approach that it took.
After going back and finally playing through that first cinematic MyCAREER story in NBA 2K14 – and getting completely hooked on it – that left NBA 2K15 as the only eighth gen game whose tale I hadn’t completed. There are a couple of reasons for that. In 2014, I still hadn’t warmed up to the idea of a narrative-driven MyCAREER mode, and unfortunately, the NBA 2K15 MyPLAYER isn’t the most likeable protagonist to take control of! I was also trying to give NBA Live 15 a fair chance to impress, and actually ended up playing a lot of Ultimate Team that year.
However, you don’t produce a feature like Wayback Wednesday unless you’re willing to give games a second chance, and dive into the history of the virtual hardwood! To that end, I have gone back and finally properly played through MyCAREER in NBA 2K15. It does have its issues, in terms of both the story and the general experience, and some of my initial impressions were on the mark. At the same time, there is an enjoyable experience there, and the approach that it took was definitely an interesting experiment. Let’s take a look back…way back…
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