Tag Archives: Bugs

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 inaccuracies and other issues that have bothered me while basketball gaming.

Even the best basketball video games have had issues and inaccuracies. Perfection is basically an impossible bar to reach, and coding a sophisticated video game of any genre is hardly as simple as typing plain English into a word processor! Also, some ideas simply just don’t pan out. And so, we accept that our favourite hoops titles will have imperfections. In the best case scenario, it doesn’t stop us from enjoying them. Mind you, because we’re passionate about basketball and basketball gaming alike, any major inaccuracies and technical issues are naturally difficult to ignore.

Of course, these issues and inaccuracies don’t always ruin basketball video games. As I said, even our favourite games have them, and we all have different standards and expectations besides. With that being said, while technical problems, inaccuracies, and other issues may not completely spoil a game, they can still end up bothering us. The good ultimately outweighs the bad, but they’re still the finer points that we can’t help but notice, and would like to see fixed and improved upon for an even better experience. To that end, while the following five issues and inaccuracies didn’t stop me from having fun on the virtual hardwood, they were nevertheless a bit annoying!

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Patch 6.0 is now available for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions of NBA 2K25, with the PC patch set to drop in time for Season 6 this Friday. As always, the update should come through automatically as long as you’re online. If it doesn’t, try restarting your console or Steam client, or check for updates manually.

This far into the game’s lifecycle, the title updates aren’t making too many major changes or additions. To that point, Patch 6.0 is mainly preparing NBA 2K25 for Season 6 in MyTEAM and MyCAREER, though it does include likeness updates for Patty Mills and Shakira Austin. There are also some minor stability and bug fixes, and a couple of Quality of Life improvements with the MyPLAYER Builder and Exchange menu in MyTEAM.

You can find the full release notes below, as well as in the NBA 2K25 update history over in our Wiki. Feel free to comment below with any thoughts and impressions, as well as join in the discussion here in the Forum.

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Patch 3.0 is now available for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S version of NBA 2K25, with the PC patch set to drop in time for the new season. As always, the update will come through automatically as long as you’re online. If it doesn’t, try checking for updates manually, or restart your console/Steam client.

In addition to preparing NBA 2K25 for Season 3 in MyTEAM and MyCAREER – tipping off November 29th – Patch 3.0 includes court and uniform updates, hair updates for various players, a couple of quality of life changes, bug fixes, and gameplay adjustments. The PC patch will also include some optimisation and performance fixes.

Check out the full notes for NBA 2K25 Patch 3.0 below, as well as in the game’s update history in our Wiki. As always, feel free to share any impressions in the comments below, as well as join in the discussion here in the Forum.

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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 is a list of five ways that roster editing was lacking in the eighth generation NBA Live releases.

For all the insistence that the only reason to prefer or still enjoy old games is blind or wilfully ignorant nostalgia, experience has taught me that the opposite is often true. Sure, I love revisiting old favourites that hold up well, and to a certain point, my nostalgia and affection for them does smooth over some rough edges. At the same time, I’ve discovered that some old favourites haven’t aged as well as I thought upon revisiting them, while games I never played or indeed didn’t care for when they were new have impressed me. It’s a case-by-case matter, rather than an absolute either way.

To that end, going back and playing some eighth gen NBA Live titles with fresh eyes and no (or low) expectations has allowed me to enjoy them more, or at least notice some of their stronger points. Unfortunately, roster editing isn’t one of them! Despite being a staple feature of basketball games and sim titles in general, roster editing was severely lacking in the NBA Live games released for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It’s a perfect example of how the series was lagging behind where it needed to be, as well as the vision for the series being out of step with what many long-time NBA Live fans wanted. Let’s take a look at the biggest roster editing shortcomings in those releases.

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Patch 1.3 is now available for the PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X version of NBA 2K25. As with all title updates, it should come through automatically as long as you’re online. If it doesn’t, try restarting your console or Steam client, or checking for updates manually.

The release notes for NBA 2K25 Patch 1.3 are as follows:

• Addressed an issue that could cause multiple versions of MyPLAYER to appear in the NBA in MyCAREER and potentially prevent certain quests from completing.
• Fixed a hang that some users were reporting when attempting to use the Social menu.
• Resolved error messages and other reported problems when attempting to launch the PC version under certain conditions.
• Fixed connection issues that could occur when playing Starting 5 games in the City.
• Stability and performance changes have been made to improve the overall playing experience.

I’ve created an article in our Wiki to document all of the patch notes for the PC, PS5, and XSX version of NBA 2K25, which you can find here. As always, the community is welcome to help us keep our Wiki resources up to date, so by all means add future patch notes if I don’t get there first. Feel free to share any thoughts on the update in the comments below, as well as join in the discussion here in the Forum!

In case you missed it, Patch 4.0 (aka the Season 4 Patch) is now available for NBA 2K24 on all platforms. As always, it should come through automatically as long as you’re online. If it doesn’t, try restarting your console or Steam client, or checking for updates manually.

Patch 4.0 prepares NBA 2K24 for Season 4 in MyCAREER and MyTEAM, and also includes a few likeness updates. The New York Knicks PA Announcer audio has been improved, there are some gameplay changes including a reduction to the effectiveness of the “Cut to the Basket Pass”, and various stability and bug fixes have been made in The City, MyCAREER, MyTEAM, and MyNBA. You can find the full patch notes below. Unfortunately, no patch notes for the PC/PlayStation 4/Xbox One version are available at this time.

You can also find full update histories for the Current Gen and Next Gen versions of NBA 2K24 in our Wiki. As always, feel free to share any thoughts in the comments below, as well as join in the discussion in our NBA 2K24 Forum!

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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 is a list of five 90s classics that needed the official updates that today’s basketball games receive.

Official updates for basketball video games are something we’re both wary of, and take for granted. After all, they can break aspects of a game while trying to fix others, and leave a title in a worse state than it was before. On the bright side, over the years we’ve seen official updates make fixes that would’ve once had to wait until the next game came out. For all the controversy that comes with day one patches, they have had their benefits. This wasn’t possible before consoles had hard drives, and even PC patches were rare and small back in the day. Many 90s classics stand as proof of this.

The fact that I’m referring to these basketball games as 90s classics should indicate that I still think very highly of them. Even without official updates, these were some of the best hoops titles of the decade, and still have replay value today. However, whether it’s a quality-of-life fix, a gameplay tweak, or updated rosters, these games definitely would’ve benefited from the official updates that are now commonplace. Obviously, the modding community was able to step up in some cases, but there are some fixes that only the developers can make. Again, it’s not my intention to dump on these 90s classics, but as far as receiving useful fixes, they sadly came along too early.

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Patch 3.0 has come through for NBA 2K23 on all platforms. As always, it should be downloaded automatically as long as you’re online. If you encounter any issues, try checking for updates manually, or restarting your console or Steam client.

The new patch updates the game for Season 3 in MyTEAM and MyCAREER, which is now underway. It also includes likeness updates for current and former NBA players, makes some minor gameplay tweaks, and resolves a few bugs. Notably, Player Lock has also been disabled in a few online modes in MyTEAM, due to issues with anti-competitive behaviour.

Check out the full releases notes for NBA 2K23 Patch 3.0 below! You’ll also find them in the Current Gen and Next Gen update histories for the game over in our Wiki. Feel free to share your impressions in the comments section, as well as join in the discussion in our NBA 2K23 Forum.

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Patch 2.0 is out now for NBA 2K23 on all platforms! It should come through automatically as long as you’re online. If it doesn’t, try checking for updates manually, or restarting your console or Steam client.

Notably, Patch 2.0 is the first update for NBA 2K23 to feature any release notes. Previous updates were essentially hotfixes for various issues, with no changes to gameplay. Conversely, the new update addresses some gameplay issues in addition to fixing bugs, as well as adding likeness updates for several NBA, WNBA, and historical players.

You can find the full patch notes below, and I’ve also created pages in our Wiki to log the update history for Current Gen and Next Gen. Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments below, as well as join in the discussion here in our NBA 2K23 Forum!

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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 a few thoughts on the amount of patches that modern basketball video games – primarily NBA 2K – tend to receive.

One of the interesting changes within the basketball gaming community is the general reaction to official patches. In the early days of the genre, when patches were only available for the PC releases, we were usually excited and grateful to get them. This of course can be ascribed to their rarity. It often took petitions and prompting from the community to get those title updates, usually accompanied by a laundry list of bugs and other issues. Even so, not every NBA Live, or other PC release for that matter, would receive an official patch.

While we’re still glad to see official patches and desire the fixes they potentially bring, it’s fair to say that there’s more cynicism and wariness surrounding those updates. It’s not unheard of for patches to break the game, either by introducing a new bug, or by making an undesirable change to the gameplay. It’s raised the question as to how many patches per year are ideal. Between their size on console and the possibility of unwanted changes, too many patches can potentially lead to inconsistent quality and cumbersome downloads. On the other hand, too few title updates can leave several issues unresolved. With that in mind, what is the ideal number of patches to receive?

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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 is a list of five ways that your turnovers will be inflated in basketball video games.

In an era where stat-padding is encouraged – in real life and on the virtual hardwood – the turnovers column is one that you don’t want to fill. They indicate ballhandling blunders, and only serve to help the other team; especially live ball turnovers! Of course, a perfect game is easier said than done, as mistakes will happen. If you look at some of the best playmakers throughout NBA history, you’ll see that their turnovers are often high. The downside of handling the ball so often is that you will be targeted by master thieves, and you’ll have more passes to be intercepted or mishandled.

Turnovers in sim basketball games generally reflect the ways that players cough up the ball in real life, but the numbers can be inflated. The goal of representing real life mistakes can lead to contrived situations where the ability to keep control of the ball and make smart decisions is taken out of the user’s hands. In the worst case scenario, this leads to losses when the game decides that despite doing everything correctly, the user will commit a costly turnover at an inopportune moment. If nothing else, it will lead to inflated numbers that don’t quite tell the truth about a gamer’s ability to take care of the rock. Here are five ways that your turnovers are bound to be inflated.

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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 things we need to stop saying in 2022.

And so, we’ve come to the end of 2021! It’s been a challenging couple of years with a global pandemic and whatnot, so hopefully better times await us all in 2022. Around these parts, we’ve obviously had basketball video games to keep us occupied. We get a lot of joy out of our hobby, but there are obviously moments of frustration as well. As I’ve said before, it’s necessary to cover all aspects of basketball gaming. We should celebrate and enjoy our passion for the virtual hardwood, and at the same time, voice our criticisms and concerns. Positive or negative, it’s vital that we have our say.

However, there are some things that we should stop saying, and with 2022 upon us, it’s a prime opportunity to cut them from the discourse. I don’t say this as a way of impeding freedom of speech, and it certainly won’t be a rule enacted in our Forum. I just believe it’s in our best interests, because thought-terminating cliches ultimately pollute the conversation. They stifle discussion of important issues, and are needlessly divisive. As always, I’m under no delusion that one article will eradicate these tired and trite phrases from the basketball gaming community. Nevertheless, if we see less of them in 2022, the quality of conversations about virtual hoops should improve.

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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 strange glitches in various basketball video games, which you may not be aware of.

As is the case with other genres, some glitches in basketball video games are well-known. In fact, some of them achieve infamy, such as the “Jesus Bynum” glitch in the NBA Elite 11 demo. Some glitches are helpful, and so we seek them out to gain additional XP or in-game currency. Other glitches are game-breaking; we hope we’ll never encounter those and are furious when we do, especially if we end up losing our save files with hours of progress (paid and No Money Spent). And of course, there are the harmless and amusing glitches that are just entertaining when they happen.

Not every glitch becomes common knowledge, of course. If you never experience something for yourself and you’re not particularly involved in online discourse, you may not know about a prominent bug in a popular title. Even when it comes to the most infamous glitches such as the aforementioned Bynum bug, not everyone who has seen them in action has experienced them in their own game. Sometimes it’s a rare and specific set of circumstances that causes the issue, which is why it’s so difficult for developers to fix them in patches. To that end, here are five strange glitches that I’ve encountered that might’ve flown under your radar, or you may have forgotten.

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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 outlines the five stages that we go through every time there’s a new basketball game release.

We’re on the road to a new basketball game release, namely NBA 2K22. Obviously, we’re all hoping for the best as far as gameplay improvements, enhancements to game modes, and a fairer approach to recurrent revenue mechanics. Alright, we probably shouldn’t hold our breath on that last point! Nevertheless, the preview season always brings a mixture of excitement, intrigue, scepticism, and cynicism. We’re hoping for good news and want to be open-minded, but we’re also leery of being disappointed, having been burned by previous releases.

Of course, we gamers – and the content creators, influencers, and pundits within gaming communities – are creatures of habit. We don’t always learn from the past, though that is admittedly a very human problem. Having covered basketball games for the NLSC for twenty years now, I’ve noticed the same cycle repeating with every game and preview season. In fact, it’s so consistent that I can apply the “five stages of grief” model to the steps we collectively go through whenever a new basketball game release is looming. Do I expect to break the cycle simply by pointing this out? No, but if nothing else, spelling it out may explain why many of us feel so cynical at times.

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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 an admittedly snarky parody that demonstrates how all too many people who cover hoops gaming go about reviewing a New Basketball Game.

In the interests of transparency, I’ve toyed around with the idea of writing an article like this for some time. However, after reading this delightfully meta piece over on Kotaku, I believe that it’s only fair that I should credit it for inspiring me to actually go through with it. Besides, it’s not as though I invited parody or satire. As it stands, The Friday Five is, shall we say, “heavily inspired” by the format of Cracked’s articles (or BuzzFeed, or anyone else producing “listicle” content, I suppose). My Wayback Wednesday feature shares its name with a popular social media hashtag.

The point is that I cannot claim one hundred percent originality in my content. Of course, that’s only appropriate when I discuss the approach that so many influencers and video game journalists have towards reviewing the New Basketball Game every year. So many basketball game reviews are copy and paste fare, though again, some might argue that it’s apt given the genre. They seldom demonstrate insight into the sport – real or virtual – and neglect the nagging legacy issues that ardent basketball gamers want to know about. So many reviews are puff pieces and glorified press releases. I don’t share them anymore, because they all sound something like this.

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