Tag Archives: Community

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 some thoughts on the way that 2K responded with pettiness to the announcement of a new college basketball game from EA Sports.

Last week, EA Sports surprised a lot of gamers with the announcement of a new college basketball title, tentatively scheduled for release in 2028. There have been some questions as to why the announcement is being made so far out. It appears that the Collegiate Licensing Company entertained bids for a new basketball game in late June, with EA Sports’ bid being successful. A three year development window would be similar to the return of EA Sports College Football, which was announced in 2021 and released in 2024. Presumably, pre-production on this new hoops title has begun.

Needless to say, while not everyone is optimistic about a new college basketball game from EA Sports – understandably so – many gamers are excited. It’ll be a new release from an established company, in a genre that’s suffered from a lack of alternatives and competition. To that point, how did 2K respond to EA Sports rejoining the basketball gaming space with a college game? In short, a quote reply to a post on X opining that they should be the ones making the game wryly saying “the campus has been quiet for too long”, and a statement in which they referred to themselves as the “undisputed home of basketball gaming”. Basically, 2K is giving pettiness the old college try.

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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 habit of tossing out confidently incorrect gotchas in online discourse.

Through message boards, chat rooms, social media platforms, and Discord servers, the internet provides us with various ways to connect and discuss the hobbies and interests that are important to us. To that point, we have numerous avenues to tell each other that we’re wrong! This is of course a very old observation about online discourse. Cunningham’s Law posits that posting an incorrect answer is the best way to get the correct information about a topic. The iconic xkcd strip “Duty Calls” sums up our need to argue with each other: “Someone is wrong on the internet!”

You don’t have to be a troll or a toxic member of an online community to have felt the catharsis of telling someone they’re wrong and setting the record straight. As much as we rightfully call out the obnoxiousness of an “um, actually“, there’s no denying its appeal. Besides, it is possible to offer up a correction and useful information without being a pompous know-it-all. Unfortunately, the appeal of being the one to catch a mistake or misinformation leads some people to be very quick on the draw. In short, some of us are way too eager to shout “wrong” in an effort to embarrass someone else and sound smart. This is how we end up with so many confidently incorrect gotchas.

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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 some thoughts on why I find it distasteful when video game companies join in with memes and jokes, especially about themselves.

Like any joke or popular fad, online memes eventually run their course. To that end, the general lifecycle of a meme has been astutely lampooned by several people. Last year, Man Carrying Thing posted a sketch that summed up the rapid rise and fall of many an absurd meme that achieves inexplicable popularity. While “OK Boomer” lives on as a common retort, cartoonist Kasia Babis aptly used it as an example of a meme’s lifecycle. Another cartoonist, Alex Krokus, perfectly captured the general response to brands jumping on memes and online trends.

Alex’s comic in particular resonates with me, because we’ve seen more and more brands attempt to join in on viral trends as a marketing strategy. Naturally, this also includes video game developers and publishers. On paper, it makes sense for these companies to angle for some viral positive publicity by attempting to cultivate a fun and relatable image, though this can easily backfire. This is especially true whenever a company tries to lean into jokes and memes about itself. Although it can be a very effective strategy if they end up pulling it off, it can easily fail to achieve the playful vibe that they’re aiming for. All too often, it instead comes across as condescending.

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m paying tribute to Doug’s Stats, an essential modding resource in the early days of our community.

I’ll admit that sometimes I yearn for the World Wide Web of yesteryear, when fansites were king and before social media became everything. Selfishly, it’s because we didn’t have to compete with platforms backed by billionaires, but beyond that, I miss seeing other websites that have the same passion that we do. At this point, we’ve outlasted a number of our contemporaries, from fellow NBA Live fansites to our former host, GameSpy. Some of those sites have been preserved by archive.org, but many others are sadly gone forever.

Occasionally, someone will drop by the Forum or one of our social media pages to reminisce and express joy that we’re still around. Obviously it’s always nice to receive flattering compliments and read people’s positive memories of the NLSC, but I also relate to it because I too am heartened to discover a site I once used to visit is still around decades later. One of those sites is Doug’s Stats, which as I mentioned, was once an essential roster modding resource in our community. Doug’s work definitely deserves recognition – even to this day – so let’s take a look back…way back…

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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 some thoughts on the notion that gamers just always complain about everything.

When you’re part of multiple fandoms, it’s interesting how the same conversations take place in every bubble. What we like is the best, so much better than the rest! We love our thing, but man, we also have some of the worst fans! We complain too much. We aren’t critical enough! Everyone pretends to like what’s new. Everyone always hates the new thing! No matter whether it’s basketball gaming or real basketball, a different genre of video games, an iconic film or TV series, or professional wrestling, I’m sure that all of these phrases sound extremely familiar.

To that point, I happened to be browsing the Mortal Kombat subreddit, and ended up reading some comments that I’ve seen the basketball gaming community utter so many times. Specifically, it was opined that the latest game in the series is always bashed unfairly, while the previous game – which itself was once subjected to the same scorn – is held up as perfect. This of course prompted someone to basically say that gamers are never happy, and constantly complain about every little thing. See what I mean about the same conversations across multiple fandoms? There is merit here, but personally, I’m tired of all the self-flagellation that we gamers partake in.

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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 some frank thoughts on the issue of having an obsession with mods.

Mods have been a huge part of what we do here at the NLSC since we were founded way back in 1996, so it’s no surprise that there’s an obsession with them. For the most part, it’s just enthusiasm, and for good reason. Mods have allowed the community to add missing content, enhance the existing content, unofficially fix bugs and other problems, and even convert games into something that was never intended. We’ll always support the modding community however we can, and acknowledge all of the hard work that goes into mods, past, present, and future.

However, there are times when our enthusiasm for mods – our obsession with them – isn’t healthy, or beneficial to basketball gaming. Making them the focus of the games we play to the exclusion of other factors and topics impacts our ability to enjoy and critique titles. It also stifles or at least derails any conversations that aren’t concerned with modding. Again, modding is and always will be a staple of our community, and I have no desire to discourage that. That’s not what this is about. It’s about recognising that an obsession with mods leads to a one-track mindset that devalues vanilla games, and often turns modding into a crutch for enjoying our time on the virtual hardwood.

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m reminiscing about my experiences updating NBA Live 96 PC before discovering the NLSC, and subsequent entry into modding.

There are a few reasons why NBA Live 96 PC remains one of my all-time favourite basketball video games after almost three decades. It was the newest NBA Live as I was really getting into basketball, set in the memorable 1996 season. Along with the PC version of NBA Jam Tournament Edition, it’s one of the very first basketball video games that I owned; indeed, I still have my original copies of both titles! It was also the game that ultimately led me to discover the NLSC when I finally had access to the internet, and thus was my introduction to modding, then called patching.

Of course, even before I learned about the modding/patching scene, I’d developed an interest in updating NBA Live 96 PC. I’d suggest that whenever a basketball game has roster editing functionality, at some point most of us get the idea to update it. Whether it’s making moves from the current year, or updating it for a new season, there’s an interest in playing a game we like with the latest rosters. There was only so much that we could change in NBA Live 96 PC’s rosters within the game itself though, which is what made modding such an exciting discovery! Let’s take a look back…way back…

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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 comments that annoy content creators.

Oh, a topic like this always feels risky! It’s impossible not to sound arrogant or ungrateful, blaming the audience instead of looking inwards. Indeed, that’s the kind of attitude that I’ve readily pushed back against when developers have tried to lay blame at the feet of gamers, rather than acknowledge issues in their titles. When it comes to encouraging engagement, there are many ways that content creators can err, from subpar work to how they speak of and to their readers, viewers, and listeners. If you put creative work out into the world, you’re going to run the gamut of responses to it.

Mind you, just as some content creators have a disgracefully disdainful view of their audience – particularly anyone who dares question their opinions – people jumping in the comments can forget that there’s a human being behind what they consume (well, unless it’s AI-generated, but that’s a gripe for another time). While it’s great to receive comments and know that your work is being seen and appreciated, there are definitely some discouraging responses and needlessly unpleasant interactions. You might say that that’s just the risk we take with any creative endeavour, but if I can be frank here today, there are some comments that content creators like me would prefer not to see.

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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 some cranky thoughts about social media as an Elder Millennial on those platforms.

As an Elder Millennial who has been using the internet since 1997, I’m no stranger to the negativity of cyberspace (do we even call it that, anymore?). It’s been over twenty years since Penny Arcade bestowed The GIFT upon us, succinctly explaining how utterly feral some people get when they’re anonymous. As you can imagine, running a fansite with a forum attached for over two decades has provided first-hand experience with that! My point is that I’m no stranger to the toxicity of the internet, and that the phenomenon has been normalised long before social media in its current form.

And yet, there’s something about social media these days that makes me, an Elder Millennial – or Millennial Prime, as I personally prefer – feel like channelling Grampa Simpson and yelling at some clouds. After all, that is what we’re doing whenever we rage against social media and online toxicity; both in the punny, literal sense of data being stored in the cloud, and the metaphorical sense of a pointless exercise. We all know that people are jerks online. We know that platforms without moderation invite hateful views at worst and unpleasant discourse at best. Still, I believe that the dismal state of social media continues to hit new lows, without many viable alternatives.

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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 some thoughts on NBA Live still having an opportunity to succeed, as unthinkable as that may be.

Can we take a moment to acknowledge how absurd, indeed how unthinkable it is, that more and more disenfranchised basketball gamers are hoping that NBA Live has an opportunity to come back? That Electronic Arts will step up and make the basketball gaming space better? EA, the company that’s infamous for microtransactions, long-running series that have lost their lustre, numerous disappointing releases, and buying smaller studios only to shut them down and cancel their games? That’s the company we’re expecting to be the good guys; the saviours of the virtual hardwood?!?

Well…yeah! At this point, if we want to see another Triple-A NBA sim game as an alternative to NBA 2K, EA Sports and NBA Live probably remain the best bet. After all, they’re the developer with the most experience with the virtual hardwood outside of Visual Concepts. They also have a long-standing partnership with the league, and an established brand name. It may be a long shot and I’m nowhere near as optimistic as I once was, but when it comes down to it, if there’s going to be a viable alternative in the space, it’s probably going to be NBA Live. To that point, as unthinkable as it may seem, NBA Live still has an opportunity to return, and find an eager audience.

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #563 of the NLSC Podcast!

With rumours that both EA Sports and Visual Concepts are considering bringing back their respective college basketball video games, which series would we personally prefer to see return? Our answer may surprise you…or then again, perhaps not! We also join the community in naming the players from NBA history and today that we most wish we could play like. It’s probably not a huge spoiler to mention that among others, we wanna be like Mike! Finally, we wrap up with a recap of a fun co-op session of NBA Live 2004 in which we took on the Houston Rockets with the Phoenix Suns, and reflect on it being a transitional year for both of those teams, as well as the NBA Live series.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 56:17 — 39.0MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!

From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #556 of the NLSC Podcast!

What are some of the worst basketball and basketball video game takes that we’ve encountered over the years? This week, we join our fellow gamers and hoop heads in recalling an assortment of truly terrible opinions that definitely made us scoff! We also played a couple of co-op games of NBA Live 18 using Parsec and the Xbox App. As we discuss, these sessions not only reminded us of the promising potential that NBA Live 18 had, but also saw us gain some satisfying revenge following a tough defeat. On that note, we also join the community in reflecting on the most devastating losses that we’ve endured on the virtual hardwood.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:28:06 — 60.9MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!

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 some thoughts on the battle between nostalgia goggles and recency bias.

For a long time – indeed, pretty much as soon as I hit my thirties ten years ago – I’ve found myself defending nostalgia. It’s not surprising. When we’re young, sneering at the older generation and all their silly likes and beliefs, we think we’ll be immune to suffering the same fate. After all, when you’re still in the younger demographic that pop culture is catering to, you don’t consider the next generation that’ll be mocking you the same way you’ve scornfully dismissed your elders! You don’t see yourself getting stuck in your ways, or your tastes and views ever becoming old-fashioned.

To once again reference an iconic and insightful scene from The Simpsons however, it’ll happen to you! You’ll realise just how divisive nostalgic opinions can be as the years go by. Not everyone is nostalgic of course, and the backlash to nostalgia – which often carries the accusation of wearing those proverbial nostalgia goggles – doesn’t just come from the younger crowd. It’s very strange to see one of your generational peers denouncing what you both grew up with, and claiming that new is always better, without any further nuance or exceptions. In any case, it draws up the generational battlelines as we accuse each other of recency bias, or donning nostalgia goggles.

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #551 of the NLSC Podcast!

Does Gravity Ball belong in NBA 2K25? This week, we join the community in reacting to the new mode for The City that’s not only paid downloadable content, but for our money, frankly has very little to do with basketball! To that point, we discuss 2K’s motivations for adding it to the game, and the bad precedent that it could set for further paid content. The Season 2 patch has also arrived for NBA 2K25, and we have thoughts to share on the gameplay fixes and other updates that it includes. We wrap up the show by touching on an important issue that’s unfortunately been affecting the modding community for some time, and has recently come to a head.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 55:19 — 38.3MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!

From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #549 of the NLSC Podcast!

Despite it never being easier to share highlights and connect with fellow gamers, we’ve noticed a general reluctance to participate in those activities and discussions nowadays. After considering some of the potential causes for this shift, we urge the community to be more proactive in sharing their love of basketball gaming, and to take an interest in what others are doing on the virtual hardwood. We also pay tribute to the late Dikembe Mutombo, and join the community in discussing the players who have been underdone in video games over the years – our Underdone Starting Five if you will – as well as our favourite current and former NBA players.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:20:00 — 55.3MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!