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Welcome to this week’s edition of The Friday Five! The Friday Five is a feature that I post every Friday in which I give my thoughts on a topic that’s related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games, as well as the real NBA, and other areas of interest to our community. The feature is presented as either a list of five items, or in the form of a Top 5 countdown. This week’s Five is a list of five details found in various basketball games that aged rather quickly.
It’s impossible for basketball video games to completely avoid being outdated in their content. Obviously there are benefits to this – as I’ve discussed on many occasions, I love the way hoops games can act as interactive NBA almanacs – but the point is that certain aspects of basketball titles will have already aged by the time we get our hands on them. If nothing else, the rosters need to be locked by a certain date, which gives us fun oddities such as players only appearing on a particular team in video games, players who ultimately never played in the NBA being included in games, and so on.
Of course, now that official roster updates are the norm, it doesn’t matter that a game’s roster has aged by its release. An abundance of content updates and patches ensure that modern games can evolve and stay current far more easily than their much older predecessors could. Of course, there are elements that aren’t updated, and although their outdated nature may not ruin a game, they nevertheless stand out. Some of the examples I’m discussing today aged quickly because of events that occurred after their release, while others were already outdated before the game hit shelves. Either way they’re fun to look back at, especially when a major event is involved.
