NLSC Your source for basketball video games.

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 pros and cons of NBA 2K24 running with a “Green or Miss” approach to shooting.

As revealed in last week’s developer blog on gameplay, shooting in NBA 2K24 will come down to “Green or Miss”. In other words, precise timing will be required, as any shot that isn’t a Green Release will be unsuccessful. However, this won’t be the case across the board. In modes such as MyNBA, MyTEAM, and Play Now, the timing will be more forgiving on lower difficulty levels, meaning that you’ll be able to make some shots without getting a Green Release. However, if you’re playing on Hall of Fame difficulty, or one of the online competitive modes, it’ll be “Green or Miss”!

It’s a strict approach to the shooting mechanics, though obviously not as strict as it could’ve been. It could prove to be a controversial decision, and will certainly fuel further arguments between NBA 2K gamers. Personally, I have mixed feelings about the “Green or Miss” approach, and the way it will be implemented in NBA 2K24. The idea has merit from the standpoint of establishing a skill-based competitive scene, but the concept still has its flaws. It needn’t impact the gameplay experience on offer in the traditional modes, but it’s still there in the background. I’m sure there will be many elitist takes on this, so let’s take a more nuanced look at the “Green or Miss” concept.

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The latest NBA Live 2005 mod releases feature a new referee update from Swishnet. Download it at the link below!

Swishnet
Swishnet Referee Update 1.1

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 Mod Releases bulletins, please see this FAQ in our Wiki.

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.

How do you like your dunks: a nasty poster capping off an aggressive drive, or stretching and soaring to catch and finish a perfectly-timed alley-oop? Thankfully, you don’t have to choose in this week’s NLSC Top 10 Plays, as both kinds of aerial artistry are on display! There’s also a great ankle-breaker, as Brandon Knight avoids carnage at the rim on this occasion, only to get taken down on the perimeter instead. A total of six different games are featured in this week’s countdown, ranging from NBA Live 2005 and NBA 2K6 – which I just covered in Wayback Wednesday – right through to NBA 2K23 Next Gen. 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 you’ll see in games that are unpatched.

Patches are a contentious issue among gamers, and basketball video games are no exception. No game is perfect, and some issues are bound to slip by QA and won’t be discovered until a game is in the public’s hands. Naturally, we want to see those problems resolved via official patches, especially when there’s no viable unofficial fix. At the same time, we’re wary of undesirable changes being made to games that we’re enjoying, as we have seen games ruined by their updates. Day one patches are also the subject of scorn, being seen as an excuse to release unfinished games.

As such, many of us have mixed feelings whenever we receive a notification that a new update is waiting to be downloaded. With that being said, I’d much rather see regular updates than have to beg for them as we used to, or not get them at all. When you look back at certain titles in their unpatched state, you’ll see missing content, features, and functionality that really needed to be there, as in these five examples. Please note that I’m intentionally excluding the 1998 rosters in NBA Live 99. While it’s a notable example of the phenomenon, all games inevitably launch with outdated rosters. These five examples are more unique side effects of a game being unpatched.

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The launch of NBA 2K24 is fast approaching, but we’re still seeing some new mod releases for NBA 2K23! Check out the latest jerseys from pinoy21 at the links below.

pinoy21
New Orleans Pelicans Statement Jersey 2023-24 (pinoy21)
USA Jersey Pack (pinoy21)
Bahamas Jersey Pack (pinoy21)
Gilas Pilipinas Jersey Pack (pinoy21)
Minnesota Timberwolves City Edition Jersey 2023-24
Phoenix Suns 2023-24 Jersey (pinoy21) (Updated to v2.0)

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 Mod Releases bulletins, please see this FAQ in our Wiki.

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 version of NBA 2K6.

As I’ve said before, as someone who grew up with NBA Live, it took me a while to truly get into the NBA 2K series. There was a sense of brand loyalty, but beyond that, I was accustomed to NBA Live’s approach to controls, gameplay mechanics, and modes. I remember trying out the PlayStation 2 version of NBA 2K6, and feeling somewhat underwhelmed. If nothing else, I disliked the Isomotion controls, which remained a barrier to getting into NBA 2K for years to come. I preferred to make the best of some rough NBA Live releases, rather than acclimate to a different game.

Obviously, I’ve had a change of heart! A handful of NBA 2K titles over the past decade now rank as some of my all-time favourite basketball video games. I’ve also been able to revisit older NBA 2K titles, and really enjoy them. One older 2K release that I’ve grown rather fond of is NBA 2K6 for Xbox 360. It seems only fitting, since I’ve also warmed up to the Xbox 360 version of NBA Live 06 after giving it another look. However, while NBA Live 06 for Xbox 360 may be slightly underrated at times, NBA 2K6 is definitely a stronger all-around game. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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The preview season for NBA 2K24 is now truly underway, with the release of the first gameplay trailer and developer blog! Both the trailer and gameplay blog are focused on the Next Gen/New Gen version of NBA 2K24, with details for Current Gen/PC likely dropping soon.

Among other things, the blog confirms that ProPLAY is indeed a new method of capturing animations from real NBA footage. It’s being touted as a major improvement over traditional motion capture, though old mocap techniques apparently still played a role in development. The blog also provides a breakdown of changes to controls and mechanics such as dribbling, shooting, Takeover, and adrenaline boosts. Notably, online play and tougher difficulty levels offline will be “Green or Miss” in NBA 2K24, with lower difficulty levels offering more forgiving timing.

As always, the trailer features an assortment of stars pulling off highlights from cinematic angles. It also includes some comparisons to real footage, spotlighting the impact of ProPLAY on the animations. You can check out the NBA 2K24 gameplay trailer below, along with my recap of the key points from the first developer blog. Although I approach developer blogs with some healthy scepticism, there are definitely some promising details. I’d also recommend giving the original blog a read, as it includes some dev diary videos with further explanations from Beluba.

Got any thoughts? Feel free to share them in the comments below, as well as join in the discussion here in the NLSC Forum!

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #490 of the NLSC Podcast!

As we await the first previews of NBA 2K24, a war of words has broken out between members of Sim Nation, comp players, and the cheesers. To that end, we discuss how toxic the discourse has become, and read out some of the community’s thoughts on the matter. As always, we catch up on what we’ve been playing this past week, from MyNBA in NBA 2K23 and MyGM in NBA 2K14, to Ultimate Team in NBA Live 18 and Fantasy Teams in NBA Live 10. We’ve also got some small updates on a couple of modding projects. Inspired by Julius Erving’s recent comments, we also share our thoughts on personal bias and agendas in Top 10 lists and other rankings, noting the similarities between discussions of NBA history and classic basketball video games.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:12:08 — 49.9MB)

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!

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 video essay examining the lies of developer blogs, with an example demonstrating why they should be taken with a grain of salt.

Back in August 2018, as the preview seasons for NBA 2K19 and NBA Live 19 were well underway, I wrote an article discussing the cynicism that developer blogs sadly often inspire. I drew some comparisons between the NBA 2K18 developer blogs and a Game Informer interview previewing NBA 2K19, noting that the latter revealed some outright lies in the former. I don’t like to throw around the word “lies” easily, but with some developer blogs, it’s a fair accusation. As we prepare for our first look at NBA 2K24, I wanted to revisit those blogs. They’re a reminder that while we may always hope for the best, we can’t always put much stock in what developer blogs say.

Considering how infrequently the illuminating discrepancies between the NBA 2K18 and NBA 2K19 previews are mentioned by content creators and influencers covering the games, I wanted to do my part in ensuring that the matter isn’t forgotten. It’s all too easy to write off understandable scepticism and fair criticism with the label of “hater”, or thought-terminating cliches about nostalgia and always preferring last year’s game. We have proof straight from the source that games don’t always get better, even if that isn’t admitted until later. Just something to keep in mind! Be sure to subscribe to the NLSC YouTube channel for more video essays, and other basketball gaming content.

And so, we enter end game! The preview season for NBA 2K24 ramps up this week and its release is looming on the horizon, but there’s one more Season to play in NBA 2K23 MyTEAM and MyCAREER. As such, Patch 9.0 has come through for NBA 2K23 this week on all platforms. It should download automatically as long as you’re online; if it doesn’t, try restarting your Steam client or console, or checking for updates manually.

At this point, it seems that 2K has given up on official patch notes. However, there obviously aren’t any major fixes or changes taking place this late in the lifecycle of NBA 2K23, so we can take it as read that Patch 9.0 simply updates the game for Season 9 in MyTEAM and MyCAREER.

Although we don’t have any detailed notes once again, you can find the update histories for the Next Gen and Current Gen versions of NBA 2K23 over in our Wiki. Feel free to post any thoughts in the comments below, as well as join in the discussion in our NBA 2K23 Forum. Also, don’t forget to stay tuned for more details on NBA 2K24! I’ll be aggregating the news as it comes through, and Dee and I will be discussing the developments on the NLSC Podcast.

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.

It’s clear that many basketball gamers in our community love playing with historical rosters, so it’s no surprise that Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant frequently appear in the NLSC Top 10 Plays. They’re in the countdown again this week, with the kind of spectacular plays that their real life counterparts often produced! The NBA Live 2001 Legends are also back, this time taking it to the rim with Steve Francis in NBA Live 2003. Indeed, aerial highlights remain the motif this week, as seven games spanning two decades are on display. 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 players that have been difficult to rate over the years.

Since they became visible attributes, Overall Ratings have been the subject of much contention and debate. They aren’t nearly as important to realistic performance as individual ratings and other tendency data, yet they’re not completely irrelevant either. If a player’s Overall Rating seems too high or too low, it’s usually an indication that some (or many) of their individual ratings are off. Also, because they’re factored into rotation logic and trade value in franchise modes, it’s important that a player’s Overall Rating generally reflects their ranking amongst their peers.

It’s why in official and unofficial rosters alike, it’s necessary to pay some attention to Overall Ratings. Attributes such as “Intangibles” – found in certain NBA 2K titles – have been helpful in artificially adjusting Overall Ratings. Otherwise, it’s usually a matter of fudging a few ratings here or there so that the Overall Rating feels more accurate, without compromising realism in player skill and performance. Even so, there are some players that have been historically difficult to rate, especially without the aid of an Intangibles attribute. Looking back, these players are among the most likely to end up being overrated or underrated, at least according to their Overall.

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Today’s NBA 2K17 mod releases feature some custom player gear by botytec, specifically some Halloween glasses. Check it out at the link below!

botytec
Halloween Glasses

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 Mod Releases bulletins, please see this FAQ in our Wiki.

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 noteworthy and recurring inaccuracies that we’ve found in basketball video games over the years.

Licensed sports titles are judged differently to other genres of video games. Because they’re aiming to depict a real sport played by real athletes, we expect accuracy. Even in arcade games with all of their breaks from reality, there’s an expectation that the players will resemble their real life counterparts, and that their ratings will reflect their strengths, weaknesses, and overall style of play. The bar is set much higher in sim titles, especially as technological improvements have led to increasingly realistic graphics and gameplay. Above all, we expect attention to detail.

Of course, none of us are infallible, and thus human error is inevitable. As anyone who’s ever worked on a roster mod can attest, it’s all too easy to overlook a jersey number, neglect a needed ratings update, or forget to double-check the spelling of a newly-added player’s name. That’s not even getting into leaving a necessary file out of the update, or any other technical mistakes! Still, it’s interesting to discover some of the inaccuracies that made it into the default rosters, especially before official roster updates were commonplace. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #489 of the NLSC Podcast!

How much should basketball video games cost, from their base price to any microtransactions that we may choose to indulge in? A recent NBA 2K24 rumour regarding season passes in MyTEAM and MyCAREER has raised concerns about the possibility of additional costs moving forward. Naturally, both we and the community have a few thoughts on the matter; as you can probably guess, we’re not big fans! On a brighter note, there’s a new PlayStation 1 emulator that we recommend, along with some other retro gaming resources. We also react to Jeff Teague’s recent comments regarding James Harden and Dwyane Wade, and a shifting NBA narrative that’s about to start tying the talking heads up in knots.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 55:08 — 38.2MB)

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!