The Friday Five

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 details in old games that I miss.

Even though I’m nostalgic for my earliest basketball gaming memories and believe that many old titles are still extremely enjoyable today, I won’t pretend that the genre hasn’t come a long way. Indeed, even within the first few years of being a basketball gamer, I was seeing and reaping the benefits of some impressive innovations. While I haven’t been entirely satisfied with the on-court experience in the current generation of NBA 2K titles – to put it mildly – the games are as deep as they’ve ever been, with some cool features that I could’ve once only dreamed of.

With that being said, there are some details in old games that have disappeared over the years, and I certainly miss them. In all fairness, I can’t argue that all of them are absolutely vital, or that their absence actively detracts from my enjoyment. In fact, some of them had already fallen by the wayside by the late 90s or early 2000s, so they’re absent from many of my all-time favourite games over the past two decades. Of course, while they may not be necessary for a basketball game to rank among the all-time great releases, they were still special. They undoubtedly helped establish my love of basketball gaming, so I do miss seeing these details from those old games.

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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 oddities that you’ll find in the SNES version of NBA Live 95.

In light of this week marking 30 years since I rented NBA Live 95 SNES for the first time, I’m doubling up on my nostalgic reflections by spotlighting some of the oddities you’ll find in that version of the game! I’d earmarked both of these topics as possible ways of celebrating the anniversary of one of my most significant basketball gaming milestones, and with the date looming, I was tossing up which one I wanted to run. I realised that it wasn’t absolutely necessary to choose between the two. To reference a couple of popular reaction GIFs: why not both? Both is good!

As is the often the case when it comes to oddities in video games that we grew up with, we definitely noticed some of them at the time, while others went overlooked for many years until we revisited those games, or someone else pointed them out. Our nostalgia is admittedly quite adept at smoothing over rough edges, and when a game is a blast, we can easily tolerate and outright ignore quirky moments. Obviously, in the early days of basketball gaming, we simply didn’t know any different! As such, glitches and weird moments are often part of our nostalgia, too. For me, these oddities in NBA Live 95 for SNES only add to its charm and the affection that I have for it.

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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 NBA Live 10 needed to have.

Although a couple of the eighth generation NBA Live releases garnered a moderately positive reception, or at least inspired a dedicated following, it’s generally agreed that NBA Live 10 was the last very good game in the series. There are several long-time basketball gamers who have gone so far as to deem it to be the best NBA Live. While I’ve developed a much greater appreciation for NBA Live 10 after revisiting it back in 2021, I wouldn’t go that far. It ranks up there for me, but I believe NBA Live 06 PC is better in terms of depth, polish, and overall quality relative to the time it was released.

Nevertheless, NBA Live 10 was a high point during a rough period for NBA Live, and not just because it cleared a low bar. It was outsold by NBA 2K10 and wasn’t as highly-regarded, but it was still well-received and seemingly a sign that the series was on the right track. That momentum regrettably went to waste, but at least we got one undeniably good NBA Live release on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360! Looking back though, it’s clear that NBA Live 10 lacked some things that it absolutely needed to have. Here are five that not only could’ve made it the best NBA Live, but may have also avoided all the disasters that led to the series’ downfall and dormancy as of 2026.

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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 old school roster modding techniques that – for the most part – stopped being necessary in newer titles.

When it comes to modding – roster or otherwise – there are some techniques that have remained fairly similar across decades of games, and even between different series. With rosters, the ratings and other attributes need to be accurately assigned so that players perform as expected. Many of the basic techniques of modding textures and models for faces, jerseys, courts, logos, arenas, and so forth apply to multiple games, though the specifics and necessary tools may certainly differ. If nothing else, while there may be some unique steps, there’ll be familiarity in the process and results.

Mind you, there have also been some noticeable differences as basketball games have become more sophisticated, and changed their file formats. As someone whose entry into roster modding came with NBA Live 96 for PC, I can absolutely attest to that! To that point, I enjoy looking back at how the hobby has changed throughout the years. I’m undoubtedly glad that changes to the games have made roster modding easier, but I’ll admit that I do have nostalgia for the techniques we had to use in the early days. It inspired us to problem-solve and to be creative in our solutions; something I believe that these five old school roster modding techniques demonstrate! Let’s begin with…

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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 reasons that I’ve shelved and abandoned my basketball video game saves over the years.

For a franchise or career mode gamer, there’s nothing better than getting hooked on a title and seeing a season (or several) through to the end. As I’ve said before – and I stand by it – completion is what we make it on the virtual hardwood. When it comes to sim games in particular, I don’t believe that it’s necessary to win a championship – or even just finish an entire season – to have enjoyed a title and feel that you got your money’s worth out of it. In fact, I’ve yet to play through at least one season from start to finish in several of my all-time favourite basketball video games!

That’s not to say that I don’t wish that I did, or that I wouldn’t be open to doing so as a retro basketball gaming experience now. Moreover, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t try to finish seasons in those old favourites. Unfortunately, those attempts were derailed, and so countless saves ended up being shelved and eventually abandoned. Mind you, while some abandoned and lost saves represent wistful What Ifs, others either were successfully completed, or I had very good reasons to quit while I was ahead! I’m sure this is something that many basketball gamers can relate to, so let’s look a look at five reasons I’ve shelved and abandoned saves, along with a few memorable examples.

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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 events that are realistic, yet feel unrealistic when they happen to us in basketball video games.

To paraphrase a couple of iconic quotes from literary giants that I mentioned in this week’s Wayback Wednesday, truth is stranger than fiction, in no small part because fiction has to adhere to possibilities that real life doesn’t. We mock events in works of fiction that seem too convenient, yet history is filled with serendipity. In a similar vein, common effects in movies and TV shows that make them more dramatic and entertaining – the sound of a blade being drawn, a bullet ricocheting, and so on – skew our expectations of reality.

In short, we’re not always as accurate as we believe when it comes to gauging whether or not something is realistic. This is certainly true of sim basketball games like NBA 2K, and NBA Live back in its heyday. We wanted to see those games become more and more realistic, and the best releases have achieved commendable results in that regard. With that being said, I’ll be the first to put my hand up and admit that my views of what’s realistic and unrealistic in sim titles have sometimes been rigid or myopic. That’s not to say that realistic moments can’t be represented poorly on the virtual hardwood, but even when they’re done well, they can feel unrealistic to us.

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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 I loved about my NBA Live 2004 Dynasty.

Back in May, I reflected on five things that I loved about my MyCAREER game with the Denver Nuggets in NBA 2K13. That was a fun trip down memory lane, so today I’m doing the same for my NBA Live 2004 Dynasty with the Chicago Bulls! Like my NBA 2K13 MyCAREER, my NBA Live 2004 Dynasty remains one of my all-time favourite basketball gaming memories and experiences. I’ve reminisced about both of them for Wayback Wednesday, but I wanted to revisit some of the key reasons that they were so memorable, and indeed more successful than a few of my other games.

After all, in theory it might seem like a good idea to take cues from games that turned out so well. It’s certainly worth keeping them in mind and having an approach that you know will generally work for you, but some of the things that make a franchise or career mode game so special just can’t be replicated. From the excitement of having a brand new experience to specific scenarios and circumstances, a certain amount of uniqueness goes a long way in those games becoming treasured memories. My NBA Live 2004 Dynasty was a combination of many things that make franchise modes an exciting journey, and these five were major factors in keeping me hooked for hours.

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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 ways that it’s getting hard to update old basketball video games.

As someone who originally got into modding basketball video games by updating NBA Live 96 more than a year after it had been superseded, I’m never going to tell anyone that they shouldn’t work on older titles! There’s novelty in updating an old favourite for the current season, combining today’s rosters with classic gameplay. Of course, it’s fun to go the other way too, winding back the clock in a new game so that we can virtually revisit and play through a nostalgic season with modern mechanics. I’ve found joy and satisfaction in tackling both kinds of projects over the years.

With that being said, continuing to update old favourites years and indeed decades after their release will only ever get tougher. Needless to say, this isn’t a new issue. Speaking from experience, choosing to mod an older release over a recent one has always meant that you’ll soon encounter technical limitations, demographic shifts, and other potential deterrents. Again, that’s not to say that you can’t or shouldn’t continue to play and update a favourite that stands the test of time. If you’re still having fun and are satisfied with what can be done, that’s ultimately what’s important. Nevertheless, if you’re looking to update older games, it would be wise to keep these things in mind.

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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 return stints that ended up connecting different eras.

There have been several distinct eras in NBA history. When it comes to discussing those different eras, I don’t believe we take the full picture into account. I’m not just talking about the whole “plumbers and dentists” rhetoric that’s used to diminish the past, though that certainly is part of it. Beyond overlooking and downplaying the level of skill in past eras though, it’s also frequently forgotten – or indeed, ignored – just how much that the eras actually overlap. We can distinguish what can be called an era and devise labels accordingly, but not draw hard lines between them.

To that point, players that we consider as being from different eras have often been contemporaries, if only very briefly. Players with lengthy careers will often end up being a link between eras, both for their team specifically and the league in general. Take Don Chaney, for instance. As a rookie on the 1969 Celtics who was also on the 1980 squad, he’s the only player to have been teammates with both Bill Russell and Larry Bird. Furthermore, it only happened because Chaney returned to the Celtics in 1977, following stints in the ABA and with the Los Angeles Lakers. He’s not the only player whose return stint connected past and present, as these examples demonstrate.

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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 modding projects that we could undertake to enhance retro basketball gaming.

As I’ve said before, we’re keen advocates of retro gaming and modding here at the NLSC! We’ll always cover new games and support the modding community in any way that we can, but we have a deep appreciation for the classics and don’t want there to be any stigma to revisiting them. There’s unquestionably a dedicated group of basketball gamers who feel as we do. One only has to look at the people who have been playing and updating NBA 2K14 PC for over a decade, or johnz1’s modding projects for NBA Jam: On Fire Edition.

Indeed, considering that our founders were providing tools for NBA Live 95 when NBA Live 96 was already out, modding has been helping to breathe new life into older titles since our community was formed! Quite a few of my modding projects have also centred around keeping old releases alive, from my earliest forays into modding NBA Live 96 to keeping the last four PC versions of NBA Live updated after the series went console-only. As I’ve been leaning more and more into my predisposition for retro gaming – and noticed others sharing that interest – I’ve been thinking about modding projects that would enhance the experience. Here are five!

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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 only appeared in basketball video games.

One of the goals of sim games such as NBA 2K and NBA Live back in the day has been to represent the league as realistically and with as much detail as possible. It’s something that games have been able to achieve with greater success as technology has improved, from deeper modes to regular roster updates. To that end, throughout the years we’ve generally been able to point out things that are missing from video games. That includes aspects of the real NBA that haven’t ever appeared on the virtual hardwood, for one reason or another.

Sometimes though, it’s been the other way around, with games including things that we don’t end up seeing in real life. I’m not talking about the over the top action of the arcade games, or the fictional content that we occasionally see in sim titles. There was a reason to include these things in games, but various circumstances prevented them from occurring in reality. As such, basketball video games have captured snapshots of What Ifs, and what would’ve been if not for an unusual turn of events. Some of them look like mistakes – and indeed, they may be roughly implemented in certain cases – but there was originally a need for them. Instead, they became interesting oddities.

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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 another list of potential comebacks that would’ve been fun to play with in video games.

As I’ve taken a few more trips around the sun, I’ve developed stronger opinions about veterans seemingly being shooed out of the NBA. It just doesn’t feel right when long-tenured players – especially former All-Stars – end their careers so unceremoniously. Of course, as Jackie MacMullan discussed in a column some ten years ago, veteran NBA players don’t always know when their time has come, and when to let go. She cited R.C. Buford, who recalled an embarrassing 15-minute workout by an unnamed former Spurs player after they expressed an interest in returning midseason.

Mind you, some players do retire too soon, while others have shown that they can still be productive in their late 30s and even into their 40s. There have also been successful comebacks, even if those players weren’t quite as good as they were in their prime. As much as “Wizards Michael Jordan” is a meme, that stint is slightly underrated, as MJ was finding his groove prior to his knee injury. With that in mind, I’m in favour of players making or even just considering comebacks. There are some fascinating What Ifs with the ones that almost happened, and they could’ve been a blast in video games, too. And so, here are five more comebacks that would’ve been fun for hoops gamers!

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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 basketball gaming activities that may sound weird, but I definitely have fun partaking in.

Gaming is meant to be fun. That may sound like I’m stating the extremely obvious, but there are times when people seemingly forget that; or perhaps more accurately, refuse to recognise that there are different ways of enjoying gaming, and that they’re all equally valid ways of having fun. To that end, it would be hypocritical of me to say that anyone who enjoys a tedious grind or wants every game to be a brutal test of your stick skills isn’t entitled to their preference. However, it tends to be those gamers who attempt to shame others for not sharing their idea of what makes gaming fun.

Indeed, I sometimes wonder if we’ve come to take gaming too seriously. That is to say, if you’re not playing competitively, levelling and ranking up, or progressing to some kind of goal, it’s considered a waste of time. Now, I certainly enjoy having goals with my basketball gaming – it’s why I aim to play entire seasons – and I’ve also had fun dipping my toe into the competitive scene. With that being said, I also enjoy just messing around and finding other ways to enjoy basketball video games. While that may not seem odd on the surface, I acknowledge that some of my basketball gaming activities are a bit weird! Without any further ado, here are five examples of that.

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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 I loved about my NBA 2K13 MyCAREER with the Denver Nuggets.

NBA 2K13 is one of the games that I’d love to bring back into my rotation this year. Not only was it a fantastic release that was enjoyed by gamers who were already fans of NBA 2K, but it was the title that got me – a long-time NBA Live fanboy – into the series. The right stick controls provided familiarity, and enhanced the gameplay in an area that I’d argue was still a weakness for NBA 2K, even as it became the premiere NBA sim. It was well-balanced, a blast on the sticks, and offered deep modes that we could enthusiastically spend hundreds and indeed thousands of hours in.

Despite traditionally being a franchise gamer, MyCAREER was my mode of choice in NBA 2K13, rather than The Association. It turned out to be one of my all-time favourite basketball gaming experiences, so I’d say it was a good decision! Although I intend to spend some more time with the rest of what NBA 2K13 has to offer as I look to make it a part of my retro basketball gaming rotation, I definitely won’t rule out revisiting that MyCAREER save every now and again. With that in mind, I’d like to reflect on five things that I loved about my NBA 2K13 MyCAREER, all of which were undoubtedly key factors in me taking such a long detour from franchise gaming.

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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 technical tips for anyone who’d like to get into retro gaming, in particular through the use of emulation.

There seems to be a growing interest in retro basketball gaming, and I love to see it! Obviously, people have been going back to old favourites or sticking with a treasured game for a long time now, but I’ve been noticing more enthusiasm for it in recent years. Whether it’s a case of NBA 2K fatigue, people reaching an age where they’re feeling more nostalgic, less stigma around retro gaming, or a combination of those factors, there’s a clear desire to revisit the classics. We’re keen advocates for that here at the NLSC, and moving forward, we’ll look to expand our retro gaming resources.

In that spirit, I’d like to share some technical advice for retro gaming, with a focus on emulation. Naturally there’s a certain charm to playing on original hardware – whether it’s a console or an older PC – and in some ways it’s definitely easier! There are many benefits to emulation though, whether we’re talking about retro console emulators or compatibility fixes to get old PC games up and running on a modern system. Thanks to the efforts of some talented people throughout the years, we’re at a point where emulation has greatly improved, and retro gaming is technically viable. You may encounter a few difficulties here and there though, so hopefully these tips will help.

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