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 recalls five annoying quirks with officiating in various basketball video games.
Is there a more unpopular figure in professional basketball than the referee? Perhaps the commissioner, but game-to-game, the officiating is what tends to draw the most complaints. We never want to see our favourite team lose thanks in part to a bad call, and there have been incidents over the years that have led us to question how far the officials will go in trying to influence the outcome. Of course, as my old coach always told us, you can’t rely on the officiating being perfect if you want to win games. It’s true, though it doesn’t lessen our frustration with questionable calls.
Poor officiating is something that’s difficult to represent on the virtual hardwood, as we’re already at the mercy of so many other gameplay mechanics. To that end, bad calls in basketball video games tend to be more the product of undesirable tuning and technical issues, or a deliberate attempt to maintain competitive balance, rather than an intentionally realistic element. It’s just the way it goes in most games that represent the rules of basketball realistically, but certain titles do have some annoying quirks in their officiating. Well, they’re annoying when they happen to you. When you benefit from them, you’ll probably feel like you’ve got a Scott Foster on your side!