Tag Archives: 16-Bit

From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #627 of the NLSC Podcast!

We’re back on the air after an unfortunate technical mishap last week, and we’re ready and eager to take a deep dive into the somewhat overlooked PlayStation version of NBA Live 96! After recapping a couple of our sessions with the game and reflecting on the nostalgic 1996 lineups for the four featured teams, we take an in-depth look at the features and on-court experience, break down the detailed results of a simulated season, and draw comparisons to the 16-bit and PC versions along the way. We also join the community in discussing which version (or versions) of NBA Live 96 we owned and played the most back in the day, and nominate which one we’d currently say is our favourite.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 57:04 — 39.6MB)

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!

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 Bart vs. the Space Mutants.

In order to plan out future features, I’ve devised lists of potential ideas. For Wayback Wednesday, that naturally includes game retrospectives, but also topics related to modding and our community, specific features and content found in basketball video games, and NBA history. After all, there’s a finite number of old games to discuss, and certainly a finite number of them that I can get actually my hands on. At some point, I’ll have covered all of the games in my collection. With that being said, there are still many game retrospectives left on my To Do list.

That brings us to Bart vs. the Space Mutants. I’ve often mentioned it in passing, but now I’m finally covering it in detail. It’s undoubtedly flawed, which isn’t surprising for the time that it was released, though other games of its vintage have avoided similar pitfalls. Nevertheless, it’s a nostalgic favourite despite its flaws; or indeed, in some ways because of them. I’m committed to covering both good and bad games, so as always this overdue retrospective will attempt to look beyond my nostalgia, while simultaneously celebrating it. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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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 provides five more corrections to errors in previous articles.

It’s been a while since I last issued some corrections to errors I’ve made in previous articles, so that must mean I’ve been completely accurate since then! Well, possibly not, though once again going back and correcting my mistakes a couple of times now has encouraged me to be more thorough with my research and fact-checking. I’d like to think that I’ve been successful in those efforts, though when you are your own editor and fact-checker, you’re definitely at risk of oversight! Whenever that happens, the best that you can do is to be transparent and provide the necessary corrections.

Obviously, that includes editing the original articles and adding the relevant footnotes, which I recently did for my NBA Jam 99 retrospective. However, I also believe that there’s value in spotlighting my mistakes like this. It feels even more transparent, as edits to the original articles can go unread. Additionally, it gives me the opportunity to dive back into those topics with the accuracy I wish I’d had the first time around, and share some interesting stories and trivia. I’d also prefer to be someone who can admit when they’re wrong and learn from their mistakes, rather than just double-down out of foolish pride. To that end, here are five more errors in my articles that I must correct!

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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 once again revisiting NBA Live 95 for the Super Nintendo, in order to demonstrate how Dominique Wilkins can break the game.

There are several reasons why I enjoy revisiting classic basketball video games. So many titles remain a blast to this day, so I love hitting the virtual hardwood in them. Also, there’s always the possibility of discovering something new, whether it’s a cool feature or mechanic that I overlooked, an explanation for a design choice or technical issue, or a fun bit of roster trivia. And of course, if you mess around with a game, you might stumble across something truly weird! That’s what happened when I reversed the Dominique Wilkins for Danny Manning trade in the Super Nintendo version of NBA Live 95. Here’s a video breaking down a rather unexpected sim engine outcome!

I hope you enjoyed this exploration of a weird phenomenon that we can create in NBA Live 95’s Season mode! I’ll have to mess around a little more and see if I can find any other players that are capable of having the same impact as Dominique Wilkins when traded. In the meantime, let me know if you’ve encountered any sim engine oddities like this one, and also be sure to subscribe to the NLSC’s YouTube channel! In addition to in-depth game retrospectives, essays, and features like this, you’ll also find plenty of gameplay highlight reels, the weekly NLSC Top 10 Plays curated by Dee, episodes of the NLSC Podcast, and more basketball gaming videos.

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 revisiting the 16-bit version of NBA Live 96 – with a focus on the SNES release – and seeing if it can be updated for 1996.

Thirty years ago, the 1995-96 NBA season was in its early stages. It turned out to be one of the most iconic campaigns in league history, with the Chicago Bulls becoming the first team to win 70 games on route to their fourth championship of the decade. However, months earlier the season had been in jeopardy, owing to the lockout of 1995. That lockout is often overlooked as a new collective bargaining agreement was ultimately reached well in time to avoid losing any games. However, it led to various 1996 season video games launching with outdated rosters.

This includes the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive versions of NBA Live 96. While the PC and PlayStation versions were released later and thus weren’t affected by the lockout, the 16-bit versions had to ship with 1995 season rosters. This also led to that version including the Expansion Draft for the Vancouver Grizzlies and Toronto Raptors, as well as a bevy of unlockable players. With these features, as well as the addition of roster customisation outside Season mode, is it possible to properly update 16-bit NBA Live 96 for the 1996 season? Let’s take a look back…way back…

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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 suggestions for indie developers who may be interested in making a basketball game.

Even as someone who grew up with video games, I never really dreamed of working in the industry. Way back in 2008, I did receive an offer to join the NBA Live team, an opportunity that I ultimately turned down for personal reasons. Of course, given what was on the horizon with NBA Elite 11, there’s a very good chance that I’d have been back in Australia and running the NLSC again within a couple of years anyway! In any case, even though I remain passionate about video games, creating one isn’t my calling. It’s a fanciful thought, but it is indeed a fantasy more than a dream.

If nothing else, I simply don’t have the skills and knowhow to create a game, and I somehow doubt that a major studio will randomly offer me creative control over a project of my choosing! When it comes to video games, I’m a consumer, critic, and content creator, and that’s absolutely fine by me. With that being said, I still have some ideas about games that I’d like to see, in particular basketball titles. Obviously that includes new NBA Live, NBA Jam, and NBA Street releases, but the indie scene also has a ton of potential. To that end, I’d like to throw out a few ideas! If you’re an indie developer who is considering creating a basketball video game, may I suggest…

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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 the rosters in the 16-bit version of NBA Live 96, which were affected by the 1995 lockout.

There have been four lockouts in the history of the NBA. We all remember the two big ones that happened in 1998 through early 1999 and in 2011, because they actually resulted in games being cancelled. Conversely, I’d suggest that fewer fans recall the lockouts of 1995 and 1996, as the former was resolved in time for the season to begin on schedule, while the latter lasted all of two hours before the league and the Players Association came to an agreement. As such, those stoppages ultimately weren’t as impactful or controversial.

Basketball gamers are well aware of the effects that lockouts had on the 1999 and 2012 season titles. However, the 1995 lockout impacted a few video games as well, including Konami’s NBA in the Zone, and NBA Live 96. The PC and PlayStation versions of NBA Live 96 were released late enough to include offseason moves and the new rookie crop, but the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive versions were released during the lockout, sticking them with outdated 1995 season rosters. As such, they capture an interesting moment in time. 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 comparing the SNES and Genesis versions of NBA Live 95.

Part of me – specifically, my most nostalgic inner child – desperately wants to pretend that the console war between Nintendo and Sega in the 90s wasn’t as petty as the dust-ups over PlayStation and Xbox over the past two decades. I’d like to say that platform warfare in the 90s was all in good fun whereas all the bickering over the 21st century consoles is Serious Business, but that’d be a lie. Sega’s marketing infamously boasted that “Genesis does what Nintendon’t“, while Nintendo hyped up “playing with power” and even welcomed fan art of Mario humiliating Sonic in its official magazines!

Putting aside my own inherent bias as a Nintendo kid and accepting that it may sound wishy-washy, from the perspective of gamers, I think we all benefitted and had a great time regardless of which big corporation we flew the flag for. Both the Genesis and Super Nintendo have classics in their libraries that are still fun to play to this day. It’s also interesting to compare and contrast the different versions of games that appeared on both consoles (and sometimes, they were completely different games!). The SNES and Genesis version of NBA Live 95 are largely the same, but there are some key differences between these 16-bit releases. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #538 of the NLSC Podcast!

As we wait for the NBA 2K25 preview season to kick into high gear, we have another PC basketball game to keep an eye on: Full Court Heroes, a retro-style 5-on-5 game in the vein of Basketball Classics. Since the demo is already available on Steam, we share a few thoughts on its gameplay, fictional teams, and planned modding capabilities, as well as what we want to see from the full version. We also recap a session in which we played NBA Live 2000 PC and NBA 2K for the Dreamcast back-to-back, leading us to compare the two games and reflect on the intertwined history of NBA Live and NBA 2K. Finally, in this week’s mailbag, we ask the community about double-dipping with NBA 2K25 on PC and console.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 55:05 — 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!

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 reflecting on how NBA Live 98 for the SNES was rather strange.

The main reason that I love collecting basketball video games is that I get to check out titles that I didn’t play when they were new. Whether it was due to my preference for NBA Live, only owning Nintendo consoles, or releases that were North American exclusives, there are titles that I didn’t experience until decades later. Getting my hands on a PlayStation 3, utilising the backwards compatibility of my PlayStation 2, and picking up a converter cartridge for my Super Nintendo, have all gone a long way in being able to expand my collection, and try out some old games for the first time.

One of those games is NBA Live 98 for the Super Nintendo. NBA Live 98 SNES was, quite frankly, a notably strange release. The PC version made a major leap, and the PlayStation port was solid in its own right. I’ve discussed NBA Live 98 in-depth in my retrospective for the 25th Anniversary of NBA Live, but I want to revisit the SNES version to highlight just how strange it was. Anyone who bought NBA Live 98 on SNES undoubtedly got the weakest version of the game, yet it has some interesting points. Let’s take 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 challenging myself to update the 16-bit version of NBA Live 95 to 1995 in Season mode.

There are many aspects of old basketball video games that younger gamers will find strange and antiquated. The idea that one of the top players in the league won’t be included and instead represented by a Roster Player is one that springs immediately to mind. The lack of a steal button is another. Perhaps the most unusual is the inclusion of the previous year’s rosters in a game whose title suggests that it should portray the current NBA season. This of course excludes extenuating circumstances such as a lockout, or the pandemic shutdown and subsequent delay of the 2021 campaign.

When basketball video games were in their relative infancy and before they became as popular and successful as they are today, we experienced all of those issues at one time or another. A prime example of a game including the previous season’s rosters is the 16-bit version of NBA Live 95. While the PC version was updated for the 1995 season and this approach would become the norm – aforementioned circumstances aside – the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis release carried on the tradition of featuring outdated lineups. The PC version facilitates roster modding, but is it possible to update NBA Live 95 for 1995? Let’s take a look back…way back…

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