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 annual honeymoon phase that accompanies the release of every NBA 2K game.
NBA 2K25 will be out this Friday – or Wednesday, if you’ve pre-ordered for the Early Tip-Off – which means it won’t be long before we get our hands on this year’s release. It’s always an exciting time, as the community prepares for another year of basketball gaming. All of those offseason moves that created intriguing new lineups? We’ll get to see how they fare on the virtual hardwood! Although they’re the cause of the New Game Blues, the fresh start and clean slate in MyTEAM and MyCAREER can also be enticing, especially with the prospect of more content to come.
And of course, we’re eager to see whether all of the improvements that were hyped up during the preview season are as good as advertised. We shouldn’t expect perfection; beyond being an impossible standard in general, any Triple-A game that’s developed in the space of a year is going to have a bug or two. Even with all the pre-release QA testing, there are going to be glitches or gameplay quirks that aren’t discovered until a game is in the hands of the masses. It’s important to remember that, but at the same time, we shouldn’t ever pretend that everything’s perfect, and refuse to criticise a new game. Too many people forget this during the annual honeymoon phase for NBA 2K.
Get ready for more fantastic highlights from the basketball gaming community in the NLSC Top 10 Plays of the Week, curated by Dee4Three! 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, or hit up Dee on Twitter.
Being a huge Michael Jordan fan, I always enjoy seeing his virtual counterpart in the NLSC Top 10 Plays. To that end, this week’s countdown features two appearances from His Airness, including a signature layup in NBA 2K16, and a dunk on the break that also showcases NBA Live 2000 PC with maxed-out textures. There are also streetball moves in NBA 2K7, tremendous arcade action in NBA Showtime: NBA on NBC, and another assortment of awesome poster dunks from a variety of games. It’s time to get 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 jams that you’d expect to see in a dunk contest that could be readily performed during gameplay in sim games.
Sim basketball games have always taken a more casual approach to realism when it comes to dunks. In the earliest NBA Live games, the flashiest dunks included 540 degree reverse jams, which could be pulled off by any player with a suitably high dunking rating. Even as dunks became more realistic over the years, players would still throw it down far more often than in real life. I’d argue that this is an acceptable break from reality, as it adds more excitement to the gameplay. A real game may only see a handful of dunks, but that’s not as fun on the virtual hardwood!
Nevertheless, while the ratio of dunks to layups and other inside shots may continue to take a more casual approach to realism, the jams themselves are ones that we’d expect to see during the course of an NBA game. With the introduction of animation packages, we’re well past the days where anyone with an above average rating could 360 and 540 in traffic. However, there are sim games that have allowed players to perform dunk contest jams during regular gameplay, and some of those releases are more recent than you might think. With that being said, here are five jams worthy of the dunk contest that we’ve been able to throw down in otherwise sim gameplay.
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 the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 version of NBA 2K8.
The tagline of NBA 2K8 was “It’s like that”. I find it extremely appropriate, though I guarantee it isn’t for the reasons that the marketing department at Take-Two intended. Instead, “it’s like that” are the frustrated words that run through my mind whenever I give NBA 2K8 a chance, and it disappoints me once again. Not to spoil the entire retrospective before I get into it, but if NBA 2K6 or NBA 2K7 had been the games to get me into the NBA 2K series – and they may well might’ve been, had I given them a fair chance back in the day – NBA 2K8 could’ve turned me off of it again.
Indeed, I’m prepared to call it one of the most overrated games in the entire series. The only reason I hesitate is because after looking at some contemporary reviews, it seems that the criticisms and unfavourable comparisons to its predecessors were being made back then, too. GameTrailers’ review even went so far as to call it a serious step backwards, and I’m inclined to agree. It’s unfortunate because the game does have a lot of good bones and enticing features, but for me, it’s been a major retro basketball gaming disappointment. 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 reflections on my 23rd anniversary as NLSC webmaster, with the age of forty looming on the horizon.
Today marks 23 years since I took over running the NLSC! I feel like I say it on every anniversary, but it’s been an extremely fun and interesting ride with its fair share of ups and downs. There have been some unpleasant moments and challenging times, but at the end of the day, I’m glad that I accepted Tim’s offer to take the reins. While there are some things that I might’ve done differently given the benefit of hindsight, I’m proud of the work that I’ve done, grateful for the friendships I’ve made, and awed by some of the opportunities that I’ve had. I’ll never regret taking the gig!
With that being said, 23 years is a long time to do anything, especially an online endeavour such as running a website. I didn’t create the NLSC, but at this point, I’ve been maintaining it for about four times as long as our founders! Of course, neither I nor the site would be here without the work of the original NLSC trio, so I’ll always give them credit for tipping things off way back in 1996. To that point though, unless you’ve been around since the black background days, you may not be aware of that era! Along with turning forty in about six weeks’ time, it only further emphasises just how long I’ve been the NLSC’s webmaster, and how quickly the years have gone by.
Get ready for more fantastic highlights from the basketball gaming community in the NLSC Top 10 Plays of the Week, curated by Dee4Three! 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, or hit up Dee on Twitter.
As is so often the case in the NLSC Top 10 Plays, a plethora of poster dunks reign supreme this week. I doubt there’ll be any complaints though, as the next best thing to throwing down a monster dunk on the virtual hardwood is seeing someone else pull off an amazing aerial display! On top of that, we’ve also got some signature moves from Hakeem Olajuwon and Manu Ginobili, and a huge clutch play in a fiercely competitive game of johnz1’s Legends On Fire Edition mod for NBA Jam: OFE. 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 basketball game intros that were in some way misleading.
There’s something special about the best basketball game intros. Sure, we often end up skipping them because we’re keen to play, but most of us will watch them in their entirety the first time we fire up a game, and probably a few times after that as well. The combination of a great song and either real NBA footage or a highlight reel created in the game itself is a fantastic way to get us in the mood to play some virtual basketball. They underscored how the games were made for hardcore hoop heads, celebrating a beautiful sport and putting the NBA in our hands.
Cynically, I might suggest that that’s why basketball game intros have been phased out over the years. As they’ve tried to appeal to a wider audience and lean into online modes starring user avatars, there’s a large portion of the userbase that probably won’t get hyped up by NBA highlights. Less cynically, the fact that intros do end up getting skipped is probably a factor as well. And of course, if we’re being honest, basketball game intros can be misleading, even deceptive. Like a carefully curated preview or back-of-the-box promotional materials, intros can oversell a game with promises of quality and features it just can’t deliver upon. Here are five examples of such intros.
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 the various iterations of 24/7 mode in NBA 2K.
There are many features, modes, and concepts in basketball video games that are older than we may recall. To that point, MyCAREER has been a staple of NBA 2K since its debut as My Player way back in NBA 2K10; a game released in 2009. For that matter, the story-driven approach to MyCAREER has been the standard for over ten years now, debuting in NBA 2K14 Next Gen and appearing in almost three times as many games as the original version of the mode. In short, a single player career mode is nothing new at this point.
However, the concept is even older than that! While we didn’t get a fully-fledged NBA-oriented career experience until 2009, earlier games did experiment with single player campaign modes. Indeed, NBA 2K branched out into this area very early on in the series, introducing 24/7 mode in ESPN NBA Basketball (aka NBA 2K4). It was relatively short-lived as it was phased out after NBA 2K7, but it stands as a creative concept that undoubtedly paved the way for modern career modes. 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 a few thoughts on the lure of online team play.
I haven’t bothered putting any serious effort into levelling up a MyPLAYER since NBA 2K21 on PlayStation 5. As I’ve explained in detail before, I was fed up with the grind, and weary of the toxicity in The Rec and NBA 2K’s online scene in general. After revisiting some old favourites and giving other older releases a second chance, I realised just how much fun I was missing out on, and quit the grind. Changing my basketball gaming habits has been so refreshing, and it’s obviously given me new topics to discuss as well. I left online team play behind, and I haven’t looked back.
Well…sort of. Kenny, Leo, and I gave 3-v-3 Pro-Am and The Rec another try in NBA 2K23 on PlayStation 5, and for the first month, we actually had some fun sessions! Of course, by Season 2, the community had figured out the meta and the hardcore online gamers had levelled up their MyPLAYERs, at which point the lack of matchmaking kept throwing us in there with super serious, souped-up opponents. It wasn’t a tough decision to leave it all behind again, and honestly, NBA 2K23 dropped out of my rotation entirely not long afterwards. However, that brief return and fond memories of NBA 2K16 and NBA 2K17 demonstrate that there’s still a lure to online team play.
Get ready for more fantastic highlights from the basketball gaming community in the NLSC Top 10 Plays of the Week, curated by Dee4Three! 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, or hit up Dee on Twitter.
You can always count on the NLSC Top 10 Plays for a good time and to get hyped for a weekend of basketball gaming, but every so often, you’ll also get a few surprises as well! For example, you normally wouldn’t expect to see a highlight from NBA Live 07 for Xbox 360 in the countdown – and rightfully so – but this week offers up an exception. On top of that, we’ve got NBA Street Showdown making its first appearance in the Top 10, an assortment of posters that you’ll want to watch again and again, and another gamewinner. 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 phantom stints that didn’t appear in any video games.
Through my series of Friday Fives documenting players who only appeared on certain teams in video games – up to 21 parts and counting! – I’ve listed a number of players whose phantom stints with teams were made tangible on the virtual hardwood. Let’s flip the topic though, and consider noteworthy phantom stints that didn’t appear in any video games. This might seem like a strange topic to explore, as obviously there are plenty of players with brief, on-paper tenures that didn’t last long enough to appear in games. However, most of them aren’t particularly exciting or interesting.
The ones that are worth talking about meet a few conditions. Naturally, they involve players who were stars or otherwise noteworthy. Also, while they ultimately didn’t get captured in any video games, the timing wasn’t too far off from it feasibly happening. Perhaps most importantly, if they had been captured in games, there’d be tremendous novelty not just in the strange sight, but also the lineups that we’d be able to play with. With those criteria in mind, I do have five examples that fit the bill. On top of being What Ifs that would’ve set up fun scenarios, they also demonstrate just how easily we can forget some of the details of major or otherwise very memorable NBA trades.
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 comparing the SNES and Genesis versions of NBA Live 95.
Part of me – specifically, my most nostalgic inner child – desperately wants to pretend that the console war between Nintendo and Sega in the 90s wasn’t as petty as the dust-ups over PlayStation and Xbox over the past two decades. I’d like to say that platform warfare in the 90s was all in good fun whereas all the bickering over the 21st century consoles is Serious Business, but that’d be a lie. Sega’s marketing infamously boasted that “Genesis does what Nintendon’t“, while Nintendo hyped up “playing with power” and even welcomed fan art of Mario humiliating Sonic in its official magazines!
Putting aside my own inherent bias as a Nintendo kid and accepting that it may sound wishy-washy, from the perspective of gamers, I think we all benefitted and had a great time regardless of which big corporation we flew the flag for. Both the Genesis and Super Nintendo have classics in their libraries that are still fun to play to this day. It’s also interesting to compare and contrast the different versions of games that appeared on both consoles (and sometimes, they were completely different games!). The SNES and Genesis version of NBA Live 95 are largely the same, but there are some key differences between these 16-bit releases. Let’s take a look back…way back…
Get ready for more fantastic highlights from the basketball gaming community in the NLSC Top 10 Plays of the Week, curated by Dee4Three! 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, or hit up Dee on Twitter.
Like the great Wilt Chamberlain, the NLSC Top 10 Plays will wow you as it breaks regulation numbers! What do I mean by that? Well, thanks to a couple of similarly spectacular highlights sharing the number one spot, this week’s countdown actually features eleven different basketball video games! Indeed, a couple of them are making their Top 10 debut, namely Space Jam and NBA Superstars, which we discussed in Episode #540 of the NLSC Podcast. From wild shots to rim-rattling dunks, the community has come through with the goods as always. 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 things that should never cost VC to equip or use.
When we talk about what basketball video games should and shouldn’t do, it does pay to think about the business side of things. Granted, that shouldn’t be our concern as consumers, but as far as feasibility or the likelihood of certain ideas, it’s something we have to keep in mind. After all, “get rid of all microtransactions” would be a fantastic suggestion in my book, but it’s just not going to happen! Sadly, including freemium mechanics in Triple-A games has proven to be too profitable for companies to not do so if they can get away with it, so it’s not a realistic request or expectation.
With that being said, I’m ultimately always going to advocate for value for money, fairness to consumers, and a quality experience when it comes to basketball video games. Again, I’m going to tailor any suggestions based on what we know is highly unlikely or unrealistic, but I’m on the side of gamers, not the suits and billion dollar corporations. Unfortunately, there are too many people who excuse or even outright shill for recurrent revenue mechanics, which has emboldened NBA 2K to place more and more content behind VC paywalls. It’s done nothing to enhance the experience for us, so to that end, here are five things that we should never have to spend VC on.
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 some 90s stars who retired (or at least, left the NBA) in 2005, yet are still playable in NBA Live 06.
It’s wise not to jump to conclusions when we see coincidences that are in fact likely occurrences. Apophenia – the tendency to perceive patterns where none exist, also called patternicity – leads us to ascribe connections and deeper meaning to unrelated events. To that point, it’s hardly unusual for a player to retire (or perhaps bow out of the NBA to play overseas) around the same time as their generational peers. Sure, a few players in every generation will stick around much longer while others will have shorter careers, but most of them will retire concurrently or within a brief span.
With that in mind, there’s nothing particularly strange or suspicious about a group of players who entered the league in the late 80s to early 90s all hanging it up in the mid 2000s. Nevertheless, it’s still interesting that 2005 was the final season for a number of stars that I grew up watching in the 90s, and that they’re all available in NBA Live 06, either still on their final team or in the Free Agents Pool. If nothing else, it was a sign that their era and generation was now definitely drawing to a close, adding some wistful nostalgia to one of my favourite games. Let’s take a look back…way back…
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