NBA 2K9

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

RedPhazon8 has dusted off NBA 2K9 and put together a roster that adds classic players to the Free Agent pool, similar to the rosters he created for NBA 2K11 and NBA 2K13. If you’re still playing NBA 2K9 or feel like dusting it off yourself, download the roster at the link below!

RedPhazon8
Classic Players to Free Agency Roster

Author: Showfom
IFF Editor

Please note that this is an older release that has been uploaded for archive purposes.