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 examines the five worst parts of retro basketball gaming.
Since I took a look at the best parts of retro basketball gaming last week, it’s only fair that I follow up with the downsides. Look, I stand by what I previously said. I’m all for normalising retro basketball gaming in addition to enjoying new releases. There should be no stigma about going back to an old favourite. We also need to can the misguided notion that they can’t be any good because new is always better. If you’re not enjoying the latest NBA 2K and you’re not beholden to online play and live service content, by all means revisit an older game and see if you still enjoy it!
To that point though, you may not. Retro gaming isn’t for everyone, and basketball titles are no different. Indeed, because they’re aiming to replicate reality, sim games in particular can age very poorly. Even if the core experience does hold up, there are other drawbacks that arise from servers being shutdown, leading to functionality and content being lost. As much as I love retro basketball gaming, I’d be lying if I said that I’m always pleasantly surprised when I fire up a game I greatly enjoyed when it was first released, or that absolutely any old title can re-enter my rotation. With that being said, these are the five biggest downsides of retro basketball gaming, in my view.