Modding

It’s that time of the year again, so we’re tipping off our fifth annual March Modness! The event is a celebration of modding, and the modding community that we’ve built and maintained over the past 25 years. Naturally we support modding all year round, but we’ve nominated March as a time to get extra creative and productive!

As always, March Modness includes a giveaway. All you need to do is upload a new mod to the Downloads section with “March Modness” in the description, and you’ll go into the draw to win a copy of NBA 2K23 PC. The mod can be for any basketball game that can be modded, including retro titles. Full terms and conditions can be found below. Congratulations once again to Pep, the winner of last year’s giveaway!

Additionally, I’m taking this opportunity to announce a change to the way I post bulletins about recent uploads. For years now, I’ve been using the term “File Additions” for those bulletins, as it’s what our founders used when they first began maintaining a Downloads database back in the mid 90s. It’s something I’ve kept out of tradition, but in order to move with the times and remove any ambiguity, those posts are now going to be titled “Mod Releases”.

I’m looking forward to this being an exciting and productive March Modness. As always, I’ll be looking to get in on the fun myself with a few releases. The modding bug does bite from time to time, and this is obviously the month to indulge it. Stay tuned for those releases, and all of the great work that I’m sure is coming this month!

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We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Start your week here at the NLSC with a feature that’s dedicated to opinions, commentary, and other fun stuff related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games. This week, I’m tipping things off with a reminder of the importance of default assets in our modding endeavours.

Since the very beginning, one of the primary goals of our modding community has been to add content to games. When we were founded as the NBA Live Series Center, this usually meant adding players such as Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley to the rosters of NBA Live PC. Once Legends and historical teams became a staple of NBA video games, there were other missing players to add. We’ve also sought to expand the selection of classic teams, as well as create retro season and all-time rosters, NCAA and foreign league total conversions, and many other fantastic projects.

The biggest projects have generally required several new assets to be created, in particular year-specific jerseys and courts, and missing player faces. Needless to say, the workload is much lighter if several assets that we need are in the game by default. At the same time, it’s something that we can take for granted. Not only can the default assets facilitate a range of modding projects – both minimalist and large in scope – but we can use them to quickly assemble fun scenarios on the virtual hardwood. Modding has opened up a world of possibilities with basketball video games, but I can’t stress enough the importance of content being readily available within the default assets.

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Episode #403 of the NLSC Podcast is out now! Derek (aka Dee4Three) and I are your hosts for this weekly podcast that’s all about basketball gaming.

The second game of our Semi-Finals series in the NLSC NBA Live 10 Tournament was marred by some technical issues, but we had much better luck with other games during a Parsec session. We recap one of the wildest games of NBA Jam Tournament Edition that we’ve ever played, using a fantastic 2014 season roster mod. Another highlight came when we revisited the PC version of NBA Live 96, and couldn’t help gushing about the presentation. Double Dribble also got a run (CORNER THREE!), though it did show its age. In this week’s mailbag, we discuss the arguments for and against paid mods, and how to avoid burnout when working on big modding projects.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:29:24 — 61.8MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Join in the conversation in the comments below, or here in the Forum! Additionally, feel free to hit us up with any feedback on the episode, as well as mailbag questions and topic suggestions for future shows. For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. The show also comes out on our YouTube channel, so be sure to subscribe for future episodes and other video content.

This is a very late announcement, but congratulations to Pep, winner of our March Modness 2021 giveaway! Pep continues to make great updates for NBA 2K14 to this day, and also won the giveaway back in 2019. Pep has won a copy of the Standard Edition of NBA 2K22 PC, and will also receive an NLSC t-shirt, courtesy of Arcane Team Apparel.

A big thanks as always to everyone who entered this year’s March Modness contest, and continues to share their mods with our community! Don’t forget that we offer free and permanent file hosting for our modding community, in order to preserve these great releases for years to come. With NBA 2K22 released and a new season of modding underway, I encourage everyone to make use of our facilities. For more information on uploading and adding files to our Downloads database, be sure to check out this tutorial.

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 ideas that could really benefit the modding scene.

When it comes to our modding community, there’s never been a question of talent, passion, or fantastic releases. There have been changing trends in the community throughout the years and challenges that we’ve faced, but one thing has remained the same: people are releasing some really cool stuff. Of course, there are ways that we could improve upon what we’re doing, and how we go about it. In previous articles, I’ve discussed the need to be cooperative, collaborative, and generally helpful. I like to think that we collectively do a good job of that, but things could be better.

If you look at the most impressive modding projects in the history of our community, you’ll see that they were the work of several people. Likewise, the reason that new faces are able to get involved with the hobby is that the people that came before them were willing to share knowledge and resources in the form of modding tutorials and mod templates. I’m grateful that those individuals have made those contributions in addition to their own releases, but I believe that we can do more. To that end, today I’m suggesting five ideas that could benefit the modding community, particularly in regards to big projects, working with multiple games, and helping others get started.

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If you’ve tuned in to the NLSC Podcast as of late, you will have heard Dee4Three and I talking about the Classic Seasons mods for NBA 2K19 PC, created by Stildo33 and company. With the server shutdown last year, it’s obviously been more difficult for the rosters to be distributed.

Fortunately, that’s no longer the case! Stildo33 has uploaded the rosters so that they can be downloaded the “old-fashioned” way, along with the necessary art packs. You can find all of the download links here in the NBA 2K19 Modding section.

Presently, the Classic Seasons mods for NBA 2K19 cover 1988-89 through to 1993-94. The releases that are currently available came out last December, but new versions are being worked on. Additionally, further seasons are also in the pipeline, with the 1995 mod already well under way.

If you’re still playing NBA 2K19 PC, and even if you’re not, I highly recommend checking out the mods. A lot of care and attention to detail has gone into them, and as you can see from the videos and screenshots users of the mod have been posting, it’s resulted in highly accurate performance. The mods have been put to good use in games being played over Parsec, and you can check out some highlights over on our YouTube channel. Congratulations and thanks to Stildo33 and company for all of their hard work so far!

Episode #379 of the NLSC Podcast is out now! Derek (aka Dee4Three) and I are your hosts for this weekly podcast that’s all about basketball gaming.

Owing to a mixture of fatigue and satisfaction with NBA 2K21, we’ve been getting our virtual hardwood fix elsewhere this past week. NBA 2K20, NBA Live 10, and even NBA Live 95 have been in the rotation, though NBA 2K20 reminded us of some woefully inaccurate ratings for players on the historical teams. We’ve also still trying to get more games working on Parsec. A recent favourite is receiving regular roster updates, and we’re inspired to brainstorm some out-of-the-box modding ideas. In this week’s mailbag, we consider the potential impact of NFL 2K on future NBA 2K titles. We also get philosophical about times in our lives that we’d revisit, for basketball gaming and other reasons.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:32:50 — 63.8MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Join in the conversation in the comments below, or here in the Forum! Additionally, feel free to hit us up with any feedback on the episode, as well as mailbag questions and topic suggestions for future shows. For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. The show also comes out on our YouTube channel, so be sure to subscribe for future episodes and other video content.

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 breakdown of five decisions that have to be made when making retro season mods.

When I discovered the NLSC in August 1997 via an Altavista search – yes, before Googling was a thing! – I was enthralled by modding, or patching as it was called back then. As I’ve said before, the ability to give my created Michael Jordan actual bio data and edit the jersey numbers of original players was honestly mind-blowing. Like a lot of gamers, I’d tried to keep the rosters of my favourite game up to date, but the editors that our founders made opened up the possibility of creating detailed roster modifications and then sharing them with other people. I was hooked.

As the current roster update for NBA Live 96 also featured retro season rosters, I discovered that concept at the same time, and it likewise drew me in. I went on to create several current roster updates over the years, as well as a few retro season mods. With official updates handling the current rosters – quibbles with their quality aside – big retro projects are more in vogue these days. We’re seeing some fantastic retro rosters for recent NBA 2K titles, and I love it! Speaking from experience, there are a few decisions that you have to make when you’re preparing to make retro season mods, in order to have the best chance of success. Today, I’m outlining five of them.

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Episode #378 of the NLSC Podcast is out now! Derek (aka Dee4Three) and I are your hosts for this weekly podcast that’s all about basketball gaming.

Having sorted out our issues with Parsec, we’ve enjoyed a full week of basketball gaming. From epic clashes with video game legends in NBA Live 10 to co-op play in NBA 2K Playgrounds 2, we’ve had a lot of fun on the virtual hardwood and blacktop this week! Spotlighting recent modding developments leads to us discussing various ideas for retro rosters, as well as philosophies for rating players. We also react to the recent leaks regarding the cover players for the standard and Legend editions of NBA 2K22. In this week’s mailbag, we’re looking back at the NBA 2K21 Next Gen trailer, and discussing some interesting issues with licensing and likeness rights.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:27:53 — 60.4MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Join in the conversation in the comments below, or here in the Forum! Additionally, feel free to hit us up with any feedback on the episode, as well as mailbag questions and topic suggestions for future shows. For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. The show also comes out on our YouTube channel, so be sure to subscribe for future episodes and other video content.

Episode #369 of the NLSC Podcast is out now! Derek (aka Dee4Three) and I are your hosts for this weekly podcast that’s all about basketball gaming.

An annoying issue in MLB The Show 20 leads us to reflect on some of the flaws in our all-time favourite basketball games. We conclude that there isn’t a title that we wouldn’t change something in; content, a mechanic, or a noteworthy bug that needed fixing. Also, March Modness may be over, but we’ve still got modding on our minds. For anyone looking to get into the hobby, we offer up some advice, and discuss the various possibilities. In this week’s mailbag, we’re throwing it back to NBA Live 2001, and discussing the benefits of the User vs. User experience.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:41:23 — 69.7MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Join in the conversation in the comments below, or here in the Forum! Additionally, feel free to hit us up with any feedback on the episode, as well as mailbag questions and topic suggestions for future shows. For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. The show also comes out on our YouTube channel, so be sure to subscribe for future episodes and other video content.

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 NBA seasons that tend to be underrepresented when it comes to retro roster mods.

Full retro season roster mods are a huge undertaking. Even if a game features a large amount of retro content in the form of historical players and throwback team art, there will still be a lot of work to be done as far as adding players and creating their faces, not to mention jerseys, courts, and logos. To that point, a modder seeking to make a retro season roster will likely choose the year carefully. Some seasons will require less work than others – especially those in the 90s onwards – because of the amount of assets that can already be utilised.

Of course, there’s another factor that goes into one’s choice of seasons for a retro mod: popularity and notoriety of the campaign in question. I’ll admit to always thinking of the 1996 season when it comes to retro roster ideas, because that’s when I really got into basketball. Generally speaking, I’m also partial to years where the Chicago Bulls were on top. However, with a rich history spanning over seventy years, there are many NBA seasons filled with stories and highlights that should inspire more retro mods than they do. That’s not to say that these seasons don’t have any retro mods already, but all the same, I’d argue that they’re underrepresented in roster projects.

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We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Start your week here at the NLSC with a feature that’s dedicated to opinions, commentary, and other fun stuff related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games. This week, I’m tipping things off with some blunt truths about paid mods, and modders that insist that they deserve payment for their work.

Way back in September 2016, I wrote an article explaining why we don’t allow paid mods in our community. I intended it to be an article that I’d link to whenever the subject came up, and over the years, it’s proven to be handy to have at the ready. The short version is that from a legal standpoint, charging for mods could land us in a lot of hot water, and we’d rather avoid that. It’s also never been the done thing in our community, and we’ve been committed to that stance for almost 25 years now. The fact of the matter is that it could cause a lot of headaches, and we don’t want that.

There’s another reason that we’re against the practice of paid mods, however; one that hasn’t really been discussed. The simple fact of the matter is that you don’t deserve to get paid for your mods. I don’t deserve to get paid for the mods I’ve made over the years, either. No one deserves to get paid for creating mods for a basketball video game, or any game for that matter. The key word here is “deserve”, which implies that one is entitled to be paid, and that simply isn’t the case. Please don’t get me wrong here. I don’t say this to diminish the efforts of modders in our community and beyond. It’s important to understand and accept this blunt truth though, so let me explain.

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We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Start your week here at the NLSC with a feature that’s dedicated to opinions, commentary, and other fun stuff related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games. This week, I’m tipping things off with a few thoughts on the need to be wisely judicious when picking modding projects to undertake.

I had what you might call a modding disaster last week. A project that I’d started on a whim went up in flames when an unexpected glitch ruined the better part of a day’s work, to the point where I had to abandon it. To say that it was extremely frustrating is an understatement. It was, after all, time that I could’ve spent on other modding projects that I’ve been trying to finish for a while now. Beyond that, I liked how it was beginning to come together. There was still some work to do, but it probably would’ve only taken another day or so.

I’ll describe the project and the resulting disaster in more detail momentarily, but in the aftermath of losing all that work, it really impressed upon me the need for good modding habits. There are reasons that we can find ourselves being pulled in many directions by appealing ideas for modding projects, why we neglect what’s already on the workbench for that shiny new spark of inspiration. Even if you only stick to one project at a time, however, there are pitfalls that can catch you out no matter how long you’ve been modding. Sometimes you won’t even consider them until it’s too late, and both time and work is lost. It’s why we need to pick our modding projects wisely.

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Episode #366 of the NLSC Podcast is out now! Derek (aka Dee4Three) and I are your hosts for this weekly podcast that’s all about basketball gaming.

A recent modding disaster inspires us to reflect on some of our past follies, and the need to adopt good modding practices. In particular, we note the appeal of a fresh start, and how it distracts us from what’s already on the workbench. Our main discussion topic this week is something we’ve been thinking about for a while: the stigma against older basketball gamers, and adult gamers in general. We discuss the issue of age-appropriate hobbies, the benefits of gaming regardless of age, and how long we see ourselves hitting the virtual hardwood. In this week’s mailbag, we’re talking about putting the fun back into the sim titles, and an interesting scenario regarding the three-point line.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:32:40 — 63.7MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Join in the conversation in the comments below, or here in the Forum! Additionally, feel free to hit us up with any feedback on the episode, as well as mailbag questions and topic suggestions for future shows. For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. The show also comes out on our YouTube channel, so be sure to subscribe for future episodes and other video content.

We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Start your week here at the NLSC with a feature that’s dedicated to opinions, commentary, and other fun stuff related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games. This week, I’m tipping things off with the story of how I stopped releasing roster updates for NBA Live, and my current stance on making any further roster mods.

In April 2013, I released the last of my current roster updates for NBA Live 2005 through to NBA Live 08. Although I mentioned at the time that it may well be the end for me making roster updates for those games, I did want to leave some wiggle room in case I returned for the 2014 season. As it stood, it’d basically taken me all season to get a new roster out. It’s safe to say that by that point, I was feeling significantly burned out on making roster updates for NBA Live. I could see the end looming, but I didn’t want to make the call. I didn’t want to disappoint anyone, or feel like I’d failed.

To that end, I made preliminary preparations for a 2014 season roster. I moved the existing players around, changed jersey numbers, and even worked on a few logo updates. When that season passed by without a roster, I did the same thing for the 2015 campaign. That time, I even made a spreadsheet, intending to map out the bio data and some preliminary ratings for players that I’d need to create. I’d repeat the process of preparing a roster – even if it was just to create a save file ready to work on – over the next few years. Despite a small spark of willingness, those projects never came to fruition. This is how my NBA Live roster updates ultimately stopped.

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