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The Friday Five: 5 Features NBA Live & NBA 2K Didn’t Originate

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 lists five features that didn’t originate in NBA Live or NBA 2K.

From the mid 90s through to today, NBA Live and NBA 2K are the two biggest names as far as sim basketball games are concerned. Obviously NBA Jam and NBA Street were the top dogs in the arcade space, and there have been other series of sim titles that have produced quality releases. However, when we’re talking about the brand leader in NBA licensed sim titles, it’s been NBA Live and NBA 2K for more than a quarter of a century, with the latter taking the crown from the former during the 2000s. Of course, it hasn’t been a competition for quite some time.

Nevertheless, being the two biggest names/brand leaders in sim basketball games has meant that many of the innovations in the genre did originate with either NBA Live or NBA 2K. To that end, they’ve ended up borrowing ideas from each other, which as I’ve long maintained is actually a good thing when it comes to features that should be staples of a sim game. Of course, there are also some great features that we take for granted that didn’t originate in NBA Live or NBA 2K. Some of them are older than we think, appearing in one of their predecessors, while other times it was one of their contemporaries that beat them to the punch. Either way, another game did it first.

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Monday Tip-Off: Broadcast Views; As Good As It Gets?

Monday Tip-Off: Broadcast Views; As Good As It Gets?

We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Start your week here at the NLSC with a feature that’s dedicated to opinions, commentary, and other fun stuff related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games. This week, I’m tipping things off with some thoughts on the broadcast camera angles, and the apparent controversy and ridiculous shaming involved with using them.

Fans are fanatical; it’s in the name! It’s fun to passionately enjoy things, but it doesn’t take much for those strong feelings to turn to tribalism and toxicity. That attitude isn’t just directed at people outside the fandom, either. There are all kinds of schisms in just about every fanbase you can imagine. Just because you like the same things, it doesn’t mean you have the same opinions, and we’re all convinced that our point of view is correct. When it comes to basketball video games, we can be really snobby about our preferences, from gameplay settings to the modes that we choose to play.

That’s why we see absurd statements like “Who even plays MyTEAM?”, when in fact it’s one of the most popular modes in NBA 2K. It’s why we see exclusively online gamers sneering at people who prefer single player experiences. “What difficulty are you playing on?” is a valid question if someone is bragging about their abilities on the virtual hardwood, but can easily turn into gatekeeping when someone is just talking about having fun with the game, which is the point of it after all. And then, there’s the mocking of choice in camera angles, particularly the broadcast cameras. I’ll just say it: it’s one of the weirdest, dumbest forms of gatekeeping I’ve seen in basketball gaming.

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