NBA 2K9

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 at long last returning to my roots as a franchise gamer, following a very long detour.

It’s been a long time coming, but I’m finally an active franchise gamer once again! Dig into the archives, and you’ll find that I was eyeing a return to franchise modes way back in October 2017. I was all set to ration my time between MyCAREER, 2K Pro-Am, MyTEAM, and MyLEAGUE. Franchise was also an option in NBA Live 18, but I wasn’t completely sold on the “streamlined” approach. In the end of course, it didn’t matter. I soured on NBA 2K18, preferred Ultimate Team in NBA Live 18, and committed to making it to the Hall of Fame in MyCAREER come NBA 2K19.

And then, I got hooked on NBA 2K14 MyCAREER! That remains in my rotation as I’m still having a blast with that career seven seasons in. However, I grew up playing old school season modes and then franchise modes, so they’ve been responsible for so many of my all-time favourite basketball gaming experiences. Indeed, this is why I’ve often considered myself a franchise gamer who has been taking a detour, but at this point, there’s no denying that I’m a career and card collecting mode gamer as well! My love of franchise gaming never truly went away though, and now that I’m back into it, I expect it’s going to be a significant part of my time on the virtual hardwood.

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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 putting some Legends back in uniform in NBA 2K9.

As I’ve mentioned before, whenever I’m hooked on an older basketball video game, part of my retro kick involves messing around with the rosters. I particularly enjoy this is in any game that has Legends and retro jerseys, as it allows me to set up some historical scenarios. While playing NBA 2K9 ahead of producing my retrospective, I ended up putting many of the Legends back in uniform. It turned out to be a fun way to talk about some strange stints that weren’t captured in the rosters of any other video games (aside from one that I felt was too important not to cover).

Before I re-created those examples of familiar faces in strange places using NBA 2K9 though, I was placing Legends back in the uniforms that they famously wore. It may seem like an unusual thing to do when there are so many games – and for that matter, mods – that allow me to play with historical rosters. However, there’s just something really fun and satisfying about messing around with a game’s retro content! NBA 2K9 doesn’t feature the largest selection of Legends in the 2K series, but it has enough to depict some memorable moments in NBA history. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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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 strange stints throughout NBA history, as portrayed by NBA 2K9.

Whenever I’m on a kick with an old basketball video game, I’ll end up messing around with the rosters. As you may have seen, I’m particularly fond of setting up historical scenarios. I’ll make do with throwback jerseys – as I did with NBA Live 10 during my extended kick with that game – but it’s even better when I have some Legends at my disposal. Since NBA 2K9 has both, I ended up snapping a bunch of screenshots of historical players in retro jerseys. It began with placing them in the uniforms that we picture them in the most, but I was soon re-creating some strange stints.

Obviously, I’ve discussed many examples of strange stints in my series of articles about familiar faces in strange places, specifically ones that were represented in the rosters of video games. To that end, I’ve chosen to spotlight the strange stints that weren’t reflected in a contemporary video game – with one exception – followed by a gallery of screenshots of all the examples that I was able to re-create in NBA 2K9. There’s no significance to that choice in game, except that it’s piggybacking on a recent retro gaming kick! With that being said, let’s take a look back…way back…

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NBA 2K9 is a game that’s been in my rotation recently, and as I noted in my Wayback Wednesday retrospective, it’s quickly retroactively rising up the ranks of my favourite 2K releases! Dee and I are also planning to start a co-op season with it, and as such, I’ve been inspired to try my hand at tinkering with the game. On a tip from Pep, I’ve put together a quick file swap mod that restores the Seattle Supersonics jerseys in NBA 2K9 PC.

While the Oklahoma City Thunder only have a home and away uniform in NBA 2K9, a few Seattle Supersonics jerseys remain as unused files. Although there’s no way to add them to the in-game jersey selection, by renaming the files we can overwrite the default Thunder uniforms and replace them. This mod does that for you, and also includes a copy of the original Thunder jerseys so that they can be quickly restored as desired.

The specific Sonics jerseys that were left over are the home and away uniforms from the late 90s, their original home jersey from the 60s, home and away throwbacks from the early 70s, their yellow alternate from the 2000s, and a red home alternate for Valentine’s Day that they didn’t end up wearing (thanks again to Pep for confirmation there). Once again, since you’ll be replacing the default Thunder uniforms, you can only use one home and away jersey at a time. Please see the included readme for more details.

Download the restored Seattle Supersonics jerseys here! I’ve also posted a release and support topic here in the Forum. Please note that these aren’t custom textures, and are just provided as-is. There isn’t much we can do when it comes to NBA 2K9 modding as most of our tools and resources are for NBA 2K10 onwards, but I thought it’d be nice to put together a few minor projects for the archives. To that end, I’m also currently working on an end-of-season roster with final 2009 lineups. Stay tuned for that minimalist project coming in the not too distant future!

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 PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 version of NBA 2K9.

I had to double-check that I hadn’t already covered NBA 2K9 in a previous Wayback Wednesday retrospective. It’s not that I won’t revisit games that I’ve already profiled if I have new thoughts to share, but if it is my second opinion, I want to acknowledge my previous take. As it happens, I specifically reflected on NBA 2K9 coming to PC, but it wasn’t a detailed retrospective. My only real commentary on the game itself was to say that it doesn’t hold up as well as its successors. Irrespective of how accurate or inaccurate that critique of NBA 2K9 is, it’s hardly an in-depth retrospective or review!

Since then, I’ve developed a greater appreciation for the games that came before NBA 2K13. NBA 2K6 and NBA 2K7 have even retroactively become a couple of my all-time favourite basketball games! However, as I’ve previously explained, I wasn’t as impressed with NBA 2K8. It felt like a misstep, a sentiment reflected in many of the contemporary reviews. In any case, I was due to revisit NBA 2K9 next, so it’s been in my rotation in anticipation of this retrospective. With that being said, does it hold up, and has it also become a retroactive favourite? Let’s take a look back…way back…

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #575 of the NLSC Podcast!

We recently played NBA 2K9 and NBA Live 09 over Parsec, with a view to starting a co-op season in one or both of them. In addition to recapping the fun we had during those sessions, this week we’re comparing and contrasting the 2009 season releases from EA Sports and Visual Concepts. We reflect on how they were both notable improvements over their immediate predecessors, discuss a couple of the teams that we’d potentially like to use in our season, and reminisce about the NBA of that era. The community also weighs in with their views on the comparison, and recalls some of the teams that they liked to use in NBA 2K9 and NBA Live 09.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 55:13 — 38.3MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

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!

Unfortunately, as the years have gone by, we’ve not only lost mods for NBA Live and NBA 2K, but also a handful of modding tools. Whenever we can recover those lost files and resources, we’ll do our best to preserve them so that they’re readily available for anyone who wants to go back to play and create mods for old favourites.

To that end, a recent post in the Forum asking about Looyh’s Hook for NBA 2K22 prompted me to dig into my archives to see if I could mirror it. Not only did I find it, but I also discovered a couple of other modding tools for various NBA 2K games that I was able to add to our Downloads section.

These include Looyh’s Hooks for NBA 2K20 and NBA 2K21, along with some of his other tools. V0.96 of gregkwaste’s NBA 2K17 3D Importer/Exporter has proven difficult to track down, but I did find V0.95 in my archives, so in the meantime we can at least preserve that release. Similarly, I was only able to find V1.1 of Looyh’s File Export Console utility for NBA 2K21, but if V1.2 can be tracked down, I’ll upload it accordingly.

A very overdue addition is FlyingFinn’s roster editor for NBA 2K9 PC! That tool has been available as an attachment in the original Forum topic since 2009, but as it’s in a reply to the original post, it’s obviously very easy to overlook. As such, it’s now also in the Downloads section for safekeeping and easy access.

You can find links to all of the NBA 2K modding tools that I’ve re-uploaded and mirrored below; all credit to the original authors, of course! As always, if you have anything in your archives and backups that the community could benefit from – be they mods, utilities, or other resources – please feel free to add them to our Downloads section! Just be sure to credit the original authors, and also ensure that they haven’t stated that they don’t want their work to be posted or mirrored anywhere else.

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Dee has uploaded some more great highlights to our YouTube channel, this time spotlighting NBA 2K9 PC. As you’re probably well aware, NBA 2K9 was the first game in the series released on PC, and these highlights demonstrate why so many basketball gamers were excited to see 2K finally land on the platform.

In this matchup, Dee took control of the Orlando Magic and faced the CPU-controlled Cleveland Cavaliers. The two teams of course clashed in the 2009 Eastern Conference Finals, with the Magic ultimately advancing to face Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers. You can expect to see some emphatic dunks from LeBron James, Dwight Howard and Mickael Pietrus, as well as some big shots from Jameer Nelson and Virtual Hardwood Legend Delonte West. It was a hard-fought game that wouldn’t be decided until the final minutes, with both teams making some great plays at both ends of the floor. Check it out!

Be sure to subscribe to the NLSC YouTube channel for regular highlights, and other basketball gaming content! As always, feel free to hit us up with any suggestions of games that you’d like to see us play, as well as revisit and discuss on the NLSC Podcast!

This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! In this feature, we dig into the archives, look back at the history of basketball gaming, and indulge in some nostalgia. Check in every Wednesday for retrospectives and other features on older versions of NBA Live, NBA 2K, and old school basketball video games in general. You’ll also find old NLSC editorials re-published with added commentary, and other flashback content. This week, I’m taking a look back at some of the unusual Overall Ratings in NBA 2K9.

In the mailbag segment of Episode #354 of the NLSC Podcast, Dee4Three and I talked about bad ratings in basketball video games throughout the years. There are plenty of examples, from odd ratings in NBA Jam Tournament Edition, to the new ratings scale in NBA Live 2004 producing some weird results. Derek brought up the Overall Ratings in NBA 2K9, which is an example I wasn’t too familiar with. NBA 2K9 isn’t a game that I’ve spent too much time with over the years, and when I have fired it up, I haven’t paid too much attention to the Overall Ratings.

Once it was brought up, however, I figured I had to check it out and perhaps discuss it further in Wayback Wednesday. Now that I’ve gone through the rosters, I would agree that there are some weirdly overrated players, considering their performance during the 2009 season, and the way that Overall Ratings above 90 are usually treated (or at least were, several years ago). With so many questionably inflated Overall Ratings in NBA 2K9, it’s worth taking a look back…way back…

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! In this feature, we dig into the archives, look back at the history of basketball gaming, and indulge in some nostalgia. Check in every Wednesday for retrospectives and other features on older versions of NBA Live, NBA 2K, and old school basketball video games in general. You’ll also find old NLSC editorials re-published with added commentary, and other flashback content. This week, I’m taking a look back at the issue with missing keys in NBA 2K9 PC.

Hopefully, I’m not the only person around these parts with an appreciation for old school adventure games from Sierra and LucasArts. Those two companies took a very different approach to the genre. While LucasArts adopted the stance of avoiding game over situations (and thereby encouraging gamers to freely experiment), Sierra’s games could be brutal in the way they punished you for trying the wrong thing or missing a detail. If you forgot to pick up a key very early on in the game, you might find that it’s unobtainable much later on, resulting in an unwinnable state. Save early, and often!

Yes, I’m going on a very long journey for an analogy; you might say, almost as far as Guybrush Threepwood travelled by rowboat around the titular location in The Secret of Monkey Island! The point is that you never want to get stuck without a required key, and unfortunately, that’s what happened to a lot of gamers who picked up the PC version of NBA 2K9. With that nostalgic and self-indulgent metaphor out of the way, let’s take a look back…way back…

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It’s not too often that we get new file additions for NBA 2K9, but today there is a new release for the first game in the series to come out on PC. sticky-fingers has released a mod that replaces the controller icons with Xbox icons, and you can download it at the link below.

sticky-fingers
Xbox Icons

Thanks to everyone who continues to contribute to our Downloads database! If you need help uploading files, be sure to check out this video tutorial. For more information about downloads, the modding community, and File Additions bulletins, please see this FAQ in our Wiki.

This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! In this feature, we dig into the archives, look back at the history of basketball gaming, and indulge in some nostalgia. Check in every Wednesday for retrospectives and other features on older versions of NBA Live, NBA 2K, and old school basketball video games in general. You’ll also find old NLSC editorials re-published with added commentary, and other flashback content. This week, I’m taking a look back at NBA 2K9 on PC.

The fact that LeBron James is appearing in his eighth consecutive NBA Finals series hasn’t just sparked fierce debate among basketball fans in the endless Greatest of All-Time debate. It’s also a sign of how quickly the last few years have flown by, with LeBron’s tenure with the Miami Heat already becoming a distant memory. Another fact that may leave you wondering where the time has gone is the number of NBA 2K games that have come out on PC, which now stands at ten. It feels like only yesterday that the series was a newcomer to the platform, but it has indeed been a decade.

Currently the only sim-oriented title that’s still being released on PC, NBA 2K has kept basketball gaming alive on the platform. When it was announced that NBA 2K9 would be coming out on PC, it came as tremendous news for a community that had felt abandoned by EA Sports. Since we’ve had a decade of NBA 2K gaming on PC at this point, I feel it’s worth reflecting upon the game that brought the series to a new audience of basketball gamers. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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Welcome to this week’s edition of The Friday Five! This is a feature that I post every Friday in which I give my thoughts on a topic that’s related to basketball video games, the real NBA or another area of interest to our community, either as a list of five items or in the form of a Top 5 countdown.

If you’re relatively new to basketball video games, or at least the basketball gaming community, you may not have much of an idea of how things used to be when it came to previews and interactions with the developers. With all the tidbits on social media, developer blogs, in-depth interviews here at the NLSC and around the web, live streams, and so on these days, we get to learn a lot about the upcoming editions of NBA Live and NBA 2K before they come out. This allows us to be well-informed, and in turn, savvy consumers.

Of course, the downside of such in-depth coverage is that some of the mystery is taken out of basketball gaming. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – with games coming out every year, we want to know whether the latest iteration is worth spending money on – but it also means that we don’t often get to be surprised by something really cool in basketball video games. Every so often though, EA Sports or 2K Sports will announce something that catches us off guard, and that’s what I’m talking about today: five times that I was surprised by basketball video games. Let’s get to the Five!

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If you’ve been wondering how to make high quality face updates for the NBA 2K series, wonder no longer! R4zoR has posted an in-depth tutorial explaining the process, along with a resource pack for Blender and Photoshop. You can check out the tutorial here and download the pack here; a huge thanks once again to R4zoR for his efforts, and willingness to share his knowledge with the modding community!

As a general reminder, we’re always keen to expand our resources for new people who wish to try their hand at patching NBA Live and NBA 2K, so if you’re an experienced modder we would greatly appreciate your assistance in creating tutorials and resources. Feel free to post any guides in the Forum, upload any template and resource packs to the Downloads section, and of course, create articles in our Wiki.

We don’t get a lot of new files for NBA 2K9 PC these days, but ZZCOOLJ21 has released a couple of new updates recently, namely conversions of JaoSming’s next gen ball for NBA 2K14 and a LeBron James face by -scarface-. Check them out at the links below.

ZZCOOLJ21 & JaoSming
Next Gen-Like Ball

ZZCOOLJ21 & -scarface-
LeBron James Next Gen Face